"Paul’s mind was naturally
and perfectly adapted to take up into itself and to develop the free,
universal, and absolute principle of Christianity."—Dr. Baur (Paul, II. 281, English
translation).

"Did St. Paul’s life end
with his own life? May we not rather
believe that in a sense higher than Chrysostom ever dreamt of [when he gave him
the glorious name of ’the Heart of the world’], the pulses of that mighty heart
are still the pulses of the world’s life, still beat in these later ages with
even greater force than ever?"—Dean
Stanley (Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age. p. 166).

§ 29. Sources and Literature on St. Paul and his Work.

I.
Sources.

1. The authentic
sources:

The Epistles of
Paul, and the Acts of the Apostles 9:1–30 and 13 to 28. Of the Epistles of Paul
the four most important Galatians, Romans, two Corinthians—are universally
acknowledged as genuine even by the most exacting critics; the Philippians,
Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians are admitted by nearly all critics; the
Pastoral Epistles, especially First Timothy, and Titus, are more or less
disputed, but even they bear the stamp of Paul’s genius.

On the coincidences
between the Acts and the Epistles see the section on the Acts. Comp. also § 22,
pp. 213 sqq.

The Acts of Paul and
Thecla strongly advocate celibacy. They are probably of Gnostic origin and
based on some local tradition. They were originally written, according to
Tertullian (De Bapt. cap. 17, comp. Jerome, Catal. cap. 7), by a
presbyter in Asia "out of love to Paul," and in support of the
heretical opinion that women have the right to preach and to baptize after the
example of Thecla; hence the author was deposed. The book was afterwards purged
of its most obnoxious features and extensively used in the Catholic church.
(See the patristic quotations in Tischendorf’s Prolegomena, p. xxiv.)
Thecla is represented as a noble virgin of Iconium, in Lycaonia, who was
betrothed to Thamyris, converted by Paul in her seventeenth year, consecrated
herself to perpetual virginity, was persecuted, carried to the stake, and
thrown before wild beasts, but miraculously delivered, and died 90 years old at
Seleucia. In the Greek church she is celebrated as the first female martyr.
Paul is described at the beginning of this book (Tischend. p. 41) as
"little in stature, bald-headed, bow-legged, well-built (or vigorous),
with knitted eye-brows, rather long-nosed, full of grace, appearing now as a
man, and now having the face of an angel." From this description Renan has
borrowed in part his fancy-sketch of Paul’s personal appearance.

Acta Pauli (Pravxei" Pauvlou¼, used by
Origen and ranked by Eusebiu" with the Antilegomena »or novqa rather). They are, like the Acta Petri (Pravxei", or Perivodoi Pevtrou), a Gnostic reconstruction of the canonical Acts and ascribed to the
authorship of St. Linus. Preserved only in fragments.

Acta Petri et Pauli. A Catholic adaptation of an Ebionite work. The Greek and Latin text was
published first in a complete form by Thilo, Halle, 1837-’38, the Greek by
Tischendorf (who collated six MSS.) in his Acta Apost. Apoc. 1851, 1–39;
English transl. by Walker in "Ante-Nicene Libr., " XVI. 256
sqq. This book records the arrival of Paul in Rome, his meeting with Peter and
Simon Magus, their trial before the tribunal of Nero, and the martyrdom of
Peter by crucifixion, and of Paul by decapitation. The legend of Domine quo
vadis is here recorded of Peter, and the story of Perpetua is interwoven
with the martyrdom of Paul.

The pseudo-Clementine Homilies, of the middle of
the second century or later, give a malignant Judaizing caricature of Paul
under the disguise of Simon Magus (in part at least), and misrepresent him as
an antinomian arch-heretic; while Peter, the proper hero of this romance, is
glorified as the apostle of pure, primitive Christianity.

TheCorrespondence of Paul and Seneca,
mentioned by Jerome (De vir. ill. c. 12) and Augustin (Ep. ad Maced. 153,
al. 54), and often copied, though with many variations, edited by Fabricius,
Cod. Apocr. N. T., and in several editions of Seneca. It consists of eight
letters of Seneca and six of Paul. They are very poor in thought and style,
full of errors of chronology and history, and undoubtedly a forgery. They arose
from the correspondence of the moral maxims of Seneca with those of Paul, which
is more apparent than real, and from the desire to recommend the Stoic
philosopher to the esteem of the Christians, or to recommend Christianity to
the students of Seneca and the Stoic philosophy. Paul was protected at Corinth
by Seneca’s brother, Gallio (Acts 18:12–16), and might have become acquainted
with the philosopher who committed suicide at Rome in 65, but there is no trace
of such acquaintance. Comp. Amédée
Fleury: Saint-Paul et Sénèque (Paris, 1853, 2 vols.); C. Aubertin: Étude
critique sur les rapports supposé entre Sénèque et Saint-Paul (Par. 1887); F. C. Baur: Seneca
und Paulus, 1858
and 1876; Reuss: art. Seneca in Herzog,
vol. XIV. 273 sqq.; Lightfoot:
Excursus in Com. on Philippians, pp 268–331; art. Paul and Seneca, in
"Westminster Review," Lond. 1880, pp. 309 sqq.

II.
Biographical and Critical.

Bishop Pearson (d. 1686): Annales Paulini. Lond. 1688. In the various
editions of his works, and also separately: Annals of St. Paul, transl. with geographical and
critical notes. Cambridge,
1825.

Lord Lyttleton (d. 1773): The Conversion
and Apostleship of St. Paul. 3d ed. Lond. 1747. Apologetic as an argument
for the truth of Christianity from the personal experience of the author.

Archdeacon William Paley (d. 1805): Horae Paulinae: or The Truth of
the Scripture History of Paul evinced by a comparison of the Epistles which
bear his name, with the Acts of the Apostles and with one another. Lond. 1790 (and subsequent
editions). Still valuable for apologetic purposes.

F. Chr. Baur (d. 1860): Paulus,
der Apostel Jesu Christi. Tüb. 1845, second ed. by E.
Zeller, Leipzig,
1866-’67, in 2 vols. Transl. into English by Allan Menzies. Lond.
(Williams & Norgate) 1873 and ’75, 2 vols. This work of the great leader of
the philosophico-critical reconstruction of the Apostolic Age (we may call him
the modern Marcion) was preceded by several special treatises on the
Christ-Party in Corinth (1831), on the Pastoral Epistles (1835), on the Epistle
to the Romans (1836), and a Latin programme on Stephen’s address before the
Sanhedrin (1829). It marks an epoch in the literature on Paul and opened new
avenues of research. It is the standard work of the Tübingen school of critics.

Conybeare and Howson: The Life and Epistles of St. Paul. Lond. 1853, 2 vols., and N.
York, 1854; 2d ed. Lond. 1856, and later editions; also an abridgment in one
vol. A very useful and popular work, especially on the geography of Paul’s
travels. Comp. also Dean Howson: Character
of St. Paul (Lond. 1862; 2d ed. 1864); Scenes from the Life of St. Paul (1867);
Metaphors of St. Paul (1868); The Companions of St. Paul (1871). Most of
these books were republished in America.

Ad. Monod (d. 1856): Saint Paul. Six
sermons. See his Sermons, Paris, 1860, vol. II. 121–296. The same in
German and English.

Otto Pfleiderer (Prof. in Berlin): Der Paulinismus. Leipzig, 1873. Follows Baur and
Holsten in developing the doctrinal system of Paul from his conversion. English
translation by E. Peters. Lond. 1877, 2 vols. Lectures on the
Influence of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christianity (The
Hibbert Lectures). Trsl. by J. Fr. Smith. Lond. and N. Y. 1885. Also his
Urchristenthum, 1887.

C. Weizsäcker: D. Apost. Zeitalter (1886),
pp. 68–355.

Fr.
Bethge: Die
Paulinischen Reden der Apostelgesch. Göttingen, 1887.

V.
Commentaries.

The Commentators on
Paul’s Epistles (in whole or in part) are so numerous that we can only mention
some of the most important:

3. The Commentaries on the
second part of Acts by De Wette,
Meyer, Baumgarten, Alexander, Hackett, Lechler, Gloag, Plumptre, Jacobson,
Lumby, Howson and Spence.

§ 30. Paul before his Conversion.

His
Natural Outfit.

We now approach the apostle of
the Gentiles who decided the victory of Christianity as a universal religion,
who labored more, both in word and deed, than all his colleagues, and who
stands out, in lonely grandeur, the most remarkable and influential character
in history. His youth as well as his closing years are involved in obscurity,
save that he began a persecutor and ended a martyr, but the midday of his life
is better known than that of any other apostle, and is replete with burning
thoughts and noble deeds that can never die, and gather strength with the
progress of the gospel from age to age and country to country.

Saul or Paul341 was of strictly Jewish
parentage, but was born, a few years after Christ,342 in the renowned Grecian
commercial and literary city of Tarsus, in the province of Cilicia, and
inherited the rights of a Roman citizen. He received a learned Jewish education
at Jerusalem in the school of the Pharisean Rabbi, Gamaliel, a grandson of
Hillel, not remaining an entire stranger to Greek literature, as his style, his
dialectic method, his allusions to heathen religion and philosophy, and his
occasional quotations from heathen poets show. Thus, a "Hebrew of the
Hebrews,"343 yet at the same time a native Hellenist, and a Roman
citizen, be combined in himself, so to speak, the three great nationalities of
the ancient world, and was endowed with all the natural qualifications for a
universal apostleship. He could argue with the Pharisees as a son of Abraham,
of the tribe of Benjamin, and as a disciple of the renowned Gamaliel, surnamed
"the Glory of the Law." He could address the Greeks in their own
beautiful tongue and with the convincing force of their logic. Clothed with the
dignity and majesty of the Roman people, he could travel safely over the whole
empire with the proud watchword: Civis Romanus sum.

This providential outfit for his
future work made him for a while the most dangerous enemy of Christianity, but
after his conversion its most useful promoter. The weapons of destruction were
turned into weapons of construction. The engine was reversed, and the direction
changed; but it remained the same engine, and its power was increased under the
new inspiration.

The intellectual and moral
endowment of Saul was of the highest order. The sharpest thinking was blended
with the tenderest feeling, the deepest mind with the strongest will. He had
Semitic fervor, Greek versatility, and Roman energy. Whatever he was, he was
with his whole soul. He was totus in illis, a man of one idea and of one purpose, first as a Jew, then as a
Christian. His nature was martial and heroic. Fear was unknown to him—except
the fear of God, which made him fearless of man. When yet a youth, he had risen
to high eminence; and had he remained a Jew, he might have become a greater
Rabbi than even Hillel or Gamaliel, as he surpassed them both in original
genius and fertility of thought.

Paul was the only scholar among
the apostles. He never displays his learning, considering it of no account as
compared with the excellency of the knowledge of Christ, for whom he suffered
the loss of all things,344 but he could not conceal it, and turned it to the best
use after his conversion. Peter and John had natural genius, but no scholastic
education; Paul had both, and thus became the founder of Christian theology and
philosophy.

His
Education.

His training was thoroughly
Jewish, rooted and grounded in the Scriptures of the Old Covenant, and those
traditions of the elders which culminated in the Talmud.345 He knew the Hebrew and Greek Bible almost by heart. In his
argumentative epistles, when addressing Jewish converts, he quotes from the
Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Psalms, now literally, now freely, sometimes ingeniously
combining several passages or verbal reminiscences, or reading between the
lines in a manner which betrays the profound student and master of the hidden
depths of the word of God, and throws a flood of light on obscure passages.346 He was quite familiar with the typical and allegorical methods of
interpretation; and he occasionally and incidentally uses Scriptural arguments,
or illustrations rather, which strike a sober scholar as far-fetched and
fanciful, though they were quite conclusive to a Jewish reader.347 But he never bases a truth on such an illustration without an
independent argument; he never indulges in the exegetical impositions and
frivolities of those "letter-worshipping Rabbis who prided themselves on
suspending dogmatic mountains by textual hairs." Through the revelation of
Christ, the Old Testament, instead of losing itself in the desert of the Talmud
or the labyrinth of the Kabbala, became to him a book of life, full of types
and promises of the great facts and truths of the gospel salvation. In Abraham
he saw the father of the faithful, in Habakkuk a preacher of justification by
faith, in the paschal lamb a type of Christ slain for the sins of the world, in
the passage of Israel through the Red Sea a prefigurement of Christian baptism,
and in the manna of the wilderness a type of the bread of life in the Lord’s
Supper.

The Hellenic culture of Paul is
a matter of dispute, denied by some, unduly exalted by others. He no doubt
acquired in the home of his boyhood and early manhood348 a knowledge of the Greek
language, for Tarsus was at that time the seat of one of the three universities
of the Roman empire, surpassing in some respects even Athens and Alexandria,
and furnished tutors to the imperial family. His teacher, Gamaliel, was
comparatively free from the rabbinical abhorrence and contempt of heathen
literature. After his conversion he devoted his life to the salvation of the
heathen, and lived for years at Tarsus, Ephesus, Corinth, and other cities of
Greece, and became a Greek to the Greeks in order to save them. It is scarcely
conceivable that a man of universal human sympathies, and so wide awake to the
deepest problems of thought, as he, should have under such circumstances taken
no notice of the vast treasures of Greek philosophy, poetry, and history. He
would certainly do what we expect every missionary to China or India to do from
love to the race which he is to benefit, and from a desire to extend his
usefulness. Paul very aptly, though only incidentally, quotes three times from
Greek poets, not only a proverbial maxim from Menander,349 and a hexameter from
Epimenides,350 which may have passed into common use, but also a
half-hexameter with a connecting particle, which he must have read in the
tedious astronomical poem of his countryman, Aratus (about b.c. 270), or in the sublime hymn of
Cleanthes to Jupiter, in both of which the passage occurs.351 He borrows some of his favorite metaphors from the Grecian games;
he disputed with Greek philosophers of different schools and addressed them
from the Areopagus with consummate wisdom and adaptation to the situation; some
suppose that he alludes even to the terminology of the Stoic philosophy when he
speaks of the "rudiments" or "elements of the world."352 He handles the Greek language, not indeed with classical purity
and elegance, yet with an almost creative vigor, transforming it into an
obedient organ of new ideas, and pressing into his service the oxymoron, the
paronomasia, the litotes, and other rhetorical figures.353 Yet all this does by no means prove a regular study or extensive
knowledge of Greek literature, but is due in part to native genius. His more
than Attic urbanity and gentlemanly refinement which breathe in his Epistles to
Philemon and the Philippians, must be traced to the influence of Christianity
rather than his intercourse with accomplished Greeks. His Hellenic learning
seems to have been only casual, incidental, and altogether subordinate to his
great aim. In this respect he differed widely from the learned Josephus, who
affected Attic purity of style, and from Philo, who allowed the revealed truth
of the Mosaic religion to be controlled, obscured, and perverted by Hellenic
philosophy. Philo idealized and explained away the Old Testament by allegorical
impositions which he substituted for grammatical expositions; Paul
spiritualized the Old Testament and drew out its deepest meaning. Philo’s
Judaism evaporated in speculative abstractions, Paul’s Judaism was elevated and
transformed into Christian realities.

His
Zeal for Judaism.

Saul was a Pharisee of the
strictest sect, not indeed of the hypocritical type, so witheringly rebuked by
our Saviour, but of the honest, truth-loving and truth-seeking sort, like that
of Nicodemus and Gamaliel. His very fanaticism in persecution arose from the
intensity of his conviction and his zeal for the religion of his fathers. He
persecuted in ignorance, and that diminished, though it did not abolish, his
guilt. He probably never saw or heard Jesus until he appeared to him at
Damascus. He may have been at Tarsus at the time of the crucifixion and
resurrection.354 But with his
Pharisaic education he regarded Jesus of Nazareth, like his teachers, as a
false Messiah, a rebel, a blasphemer, who was justly condemned to death. And he
acted according to his conviction. He took the most prominent part in the
persecution of Stephen and delighted in his death. Not satisfied with this, he
procured from the Sanhedrin, which had the oversight of all the synagogues and
disciplinary punishments for offences against the law, full power to persecute
and arrest the scattered disciples. Thus armed, he set out for Damascus, the
capital of Syria, which numbered many synagogues. He was determined to
exterminate the dangerous sect from the face of the earth, for the glory of
God. But the height of his opposition was the beginning of his devotion to
Christianity.

His
External Relations and Personal Appearance.

On the subordinate questions of
Paul’s external condition and relations we have no certain information. Being a
Roman citizen, he belonged to the respectable class of society, but must have
been poor; for he depended for support on a trade which he learned in
accordance with rabbinical custom; it was the trade of tent-making, very common
in Cilicia, and not profitable except in large cities.355

He had a sister living at
Jerusalem whose son was instrumental in saving his life.356

He was probably never married.
Some suppose that he was a widower. Jewish and rabbinical custom, the
completeness of his moral character, his ideal conception of marriage as
reflecting the mystical union of Christ with his church, his exhortations to
conjugal, parental, and filial duties, seem to point to experimental knowledge
of domestic life. But as a Christian missionary moving from place to place, and
exposed to all sorts of hardship and persecution, he felt it his duty to abide
alone.357 He sacrificed the blessings of home and family to the
advancement of the kingdom of Christ.358

His "bodily presence was
weak, and his speech contemptible" (of no value), in the superficial
judgment of the Corinthians, who missed the rhetorical ornaments, yet could not
help admitting that his "letters were weighty and strong."359 Some of the greatest men have been small in size, and some of the
purest souls forbidding in body. Socrates was the homeliest, and yet the wisest
of Greeks. Neander, a converted Jew, like Paul, was short, feeble, and
strikingly odd in his whole appearance, but a rare humility, benignity, and
heavenly aspiration beamed from his face beneath his dark and bushy eyebrows. So
we may well imagine that the expression of Paul’s countenance was highly
intellectual and spiritual, and that he looked "sometimes like a man and
sometimes like an angel."360

He was afflicted with a
mysterious, painful, recurrent, and repulsive physical infirmity, which he
calls a "thorn in the flesh, " and which acted as a check upon
spiritual pride and self-exultation over his abundance of revelations.361 He bore the heavenly treasure in an earthly vessel and his
strength was made perfect in weakness.362 But all the more must we admire the moral heroism which turned
weakness itself into an element of strength, and despite pain and trouble and
persecution carried the gospel salvation triumphantly from Damascus to Rome.

The conversion of Paul marks not
only a turning-point in his personal history, but also an important epoch in
the history of the apostolic church, and consequently in the history of
mankind. It was the most fruitful event since the miracle of Pentecost, and
secured the universal victory of Christianity.

The transformation of the most
dangerous persecutor into the most successful promoter of Christianity is
nothing less than a miracle of divine grace. It rests on the greater miracle of
the resurrection of Christ. Both are inseparably connected; without the
resurrection the conversion would have been impossible, and on the other hand
the conversion of such a man and with such results is one of the strongest
proofs of the resurrection.

The bold attack of Stephen—the
forerunner of Paul—upon the hard, stiff-necked Judaism which had crucified the
Messiah, provoked a determined and systematic attempt on the part of the
Sanhedrin to crucify Jesus again by destroying his church. In this struggle for
life and death Saul the Pharisee, the bravest and strongest of the rising
rabbis, was the willing and accepted leader.

After the martyrdom of Stephen
and the dispersion of the congregation of Jerusalem, he proceeded to Damascus
in suit of the fugitive disciples of Jesus, as a commissioner of the Sanhedrin,
a sort of inquisitor-general, with full authority and determination to stamp
out the Christian rebellion, and to bring all the apostates he could find,
whether they were men or women, in chains to the holy city to be condemned by
the chief priests.

Damascus is one of the oldest
cities in the world, known in the days of Abraham, and bursts upon the
traveller like a vision of paradise amidst a burning and barren wilderness of
sand; it is watered by the never-failing rivers Abana and Pharpar (which Naaman
of old preferred to all the waters of Israel), and embosomed in luxuriant
gardens of flowers and groves of tropical fruit trees; hence glorified by
Eastern poets as "the Eye of the Desert."

But a far higher vision than
this earthly paradise was in store for Saul as he approached the city. A
supernatural light from heaven, brighter than the Syrian sun, suddenly flashed
around him at midday, and Jesus of Nazareth, whom he persecuted in his humble
disciples, appeared to him in his glory as the exalted Messiah, asking him in
the Hebrew tongue: "Shaûl, Shaûl, why persecutest thou Me?363 It was a question both of rebuke and of love, and it melted his
heart. He fell prostrate to the ground. He saw and heard, he trembled and
obeyed, he believed and rejoiced. As he rose from the earth he saw no man. Like
a helpless child, blinded by the dazzling light, he was led to Damascus, and
after three days of blindness and fasting he was cured and baptized—not by
Peter or James or John, but—by one of the humble disciples whom he had come to
destroy. The haughty, self-righteous, intolerant, raging Pharisee was changed
into an humble, penitent, grateful, loving servant of Jesus. He threw away
self-righteousness, learning, influence, power, prospects, and cast in his lot
with a small, despised sect at the risk of his life. If there ever was an
honest, unselfish, radical, and effective change of conviction and conduct, it
was that of Saul of Tarsus. He became, by a creative act of the Holy Spirit, a
"new creature in Christ Jesus."364

We have three full accounts of
this event in the Acts, one from Luke, two from Paul himself, with slight
variations in detail, which only confirm the essential harmony.365 Paul also alludes to it five or six times in his Epistles.366 In all these passages he represents the change as an act brought
about by a direct intervention of Jesus, who revealed himself in his glory from
heaven, and struck conviction into his mind like lightning at midnight. He
compares it to the creative act of God when He commanded the light to shine out
of darkness.367 He lays great
stress on the fact that he was converted and called to the apostolate directly
by Christ, without any human agency; that he learned his gospel of free and
universal grace by revelation, and not from the older apostles, whom he did not
even see till three years after his call.368

The conversion, indeed, was not
a moral compulsion, but included the responsibility of assent or dissent. God
converts nobody by force or by magic. He made man free, and acts upon him as a
moral being. Paul might have "disobeyed the heavenly vision."369 He might have "kicked against the goads," though
it was "hard" (not impossible) to do so.370 These words imply some psychological preparation, some doubt and
misgiving as to his course, some moral conflict between the flesh and the
spirit, which he himself described twenty years afterwards from personal experience,
and which issues in the cry of despair: "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?"371 On his journey
from Jerusalem to Damascus, which takes a full week on foot or horseback—the
distance being about 140 miles—as he was passing, in the solitude of his own
thoughts, through Samaria, Galilee, and across Mount Hermon, he had ample time
for reflection, and we may well imagine how the shining face of the martyr
Stephen, as he stood like a holy angel before the Sanhedrin, and as in the last
moment he prayed for his murderers, was haunting him like a ghost and warning
him to stop his mad career.

Yet we must not overrate this
preparation or anticipate his riper experience in the three days that
intervened between his conversion and his baptism, and during the three years
of quiet meditation in Arabia. He was no doubt longing for truth and for
righteousness, but there was a thick veil over his mental eye which could only
be taken away by a hand from without; access to his heart was barred by an iron
door of prejudice which had to be broken in by Jesus himself. On his way to
Damascus he was "yet breathing threatening and slaughter against the
disciples of the Lord," and thinking he was doing "God service;"
he was, to use his own language, "beyond measure" persecuting the
church of God and endeavoring to destroy it, "being more exceedingly zealous
for the traditions of his fathers" than many of his age, when "it
pleased God to reveal his Son in him." Moreover it is only in the light of
faith that we see the midnight darkness of our sin, and it is only beneath the
cross of Christ that we feel the whole crushing weight of guilt and the
unfathomable depth of God’s redeeming love. No amount of subjective thought and
reflection could have brought about that radical change in so short a time. It
was the objective appearance of Jesus that effected it.

This appearance implied the
resurrection and the ascension, and this was the irresistible evidence of His
Messiahship, God’s own seal of approval upon the work of Jesus. And the
resurrection again shed a new light upon His death on the cross, disclosing it
as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world, as the means of procuring
pardon and peace consistent with the claims of divine justice. What a
revelation! That same Jesus of Nazareth
whom he hated and persecuted as a false prophet justly crucified between two
robbers, stood before Saul as the risen, ascended, and glorified Messiah! And instead of crushing the persecutor as he
deserved, He pardoned him and called him to be His witness before Jews and
Gentiles! This revelation was enough for an orthodox Jew waiting for the hope
of Israel to make him a Christian, and enough for a Jew of such force of
character to make him an earnest and determined Christian. The logic of his
intellect and the energy of his will required that he should love and promote
the new faith with the same enthusiasm with which he had hated and persecuted
it; for hatred is but inverted love, and the intensity of love and hatred
depends on the strength of affection and the ardor of temper.

With all the suddenness and
radicalness of the transformation there is nevertheless a bond of unity between
Saul the Pharisee and Paul the Christian. It was the same person with the same
end in view, but in opposite directions. We must remember that he was not a
worldly, indifferent, cold-blooded man, but an intensely religious man. While
persecuting the church, he was "blameless" as touching the
righteousness of the law.372 He resembled
the rich youth who had observed the commandments, yet lacked the one things
needful, and of whom Mark says that Jesus "loved him."373 He was not converted from infidelity to faith, but from a lower
faith to a purer faith, from the religion of Moses to the religion of Christ,
from the theology of the law to the theology of the gospel. How shall a sinner
be justified before the tribunal of a holy God? That was with him the question of questions before as well as
after his conversion; not a scholastic question merely, but even far more a
moral and religious question. For righteousness, to the Hebrew mind, is
conformity to the will of God as expressed in his revealed law, and implies
life eternal as its reward. The honest and earnest pursuit of righteousness
is the connecting link between the two periods of Paul’s life. First he labored
to secure it by works of the law, then obedience of faith. What he had sought
in vain by his fanatical zeal for the traditions of Judaism, he found
gratuitously and at once by trust in the cross of Christ: pardon and peace with
God. By the discipline of the Mosaic law as a tutor he was led beyond its
restraints and prepared for manhood and freedom. Through the law he died to the
law that he might live unto God. His old self, with its lusts, was crucified
with Christ, so that henceforth he lived no longer himself, but Christ lived in
him.374 He was
mystically identified with his Saviour and had no separate existence from him.
The whole of Christianity, the whole of life, was summed up to him in the one
word: Christ. He determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified
for our sins, and risen again for our justification.375

His experience of justification
by faith, his free pardon and acceptance by Christ were to him the strongest
stimulus to gratitude and consecration. His great sin of persecution, like
Peter’s denial, was overruled for his own good: the remembrance of it kept him
humble, guarded him against temptation, and intensified his zeal and devotion.
"I am the least of the apostles," he said in unfeigned humility that am not meet to be called an apostle,
because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am;
and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more
abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with
me."376 This confession
contains, in epitome, the whole meaning of his life and work.

The idea of justification by the
free grace of God in Christ through a living faith which makes Christ and his
merits our own and leads to consecration and holiness, is the central idea of
Paul’s Epistles. His whole theology, doctrinal, ethical, and practical, lies,
like a germ, in his conversion; but it was actually developed by a sharp
conflict with Judaizing teachers who continued to trust in the law for
righteousness and salvation, and thus virtually frustrated the grace of God and
made Christ’s death unnecessary and fruitless.

Although Paul broke radically
with Judaism and opposed the Pharisaical notion of legal righteousness at every
step and with all his might, he was far from opposing the Old Testament or the
Jewish people. Herein he shows his great wisdom and moderation, and his
infinite superiority over Marcion and other ultra- and pseudo-Pauline
reformers. He now expounded the Scriptures as a direct preparation for the
gospel, the law as a schoolmaster leading to Christ, Abraham as the father of
the faithful. And as to his countrymen after the flesh, he loved them more than
ever before. Filled with the amazing love of Christ who had pardoned him,
"the chief of sinners," he was ready for the greatest possible
sacrifice if thereby he might save them. His startling language in the ninth
chapter of the Romans is not rhetorical exaggeration, but the genuine
expression of that heroic self-denial and devotion which animated Moses, and
which culminated in the sacrifice of the eternal Son of God on the cross of
Calvary.377

Paul’s conversion was at the
same time his call to the apostleship, not indeed to a place among the Twelve
(for the vacancy of Judas was filled), but to the independent apostleship of
the Gentiles.378 Then followed
an uninterrupted activity of more than a quarter of a century, which for
interest and for permanent and ever-growing usefulness has no parallel in the
annals of history, and affords an unanswerable proof of the sincerity of his
conversion and the truth of Christianity.379

Analogous
Conversions.

God deals with men according to
their peculiar character and condition. As in Elijah’s vision on Mount Horeb,
God appears now in the mighty rushing wind that uproots the trees, now in the
earthquake that rends the rocks, now in the consuming fire, now in the still
small voice. Some are suddenly converted, and can remember the place and hour;
others are gradually and imperceptibly changed in spirit and conduct; still
others grow up unconsciously in the Christian faith from the mother’s knee and
the baptismal font. The stronger the will the more force it requires to
overcome the resistance, and the more thorough and lasting is the change. Of
all sudden and radical conversions that of Saul was the most sudden and the
most radical. In several respects it stands quite alone, as the man himself and
his work. Yet there are faint analogies in history. The divines who most
sympathized with his spirit and system of doctrine, passed through a similar
experience, and were much aided by his example and writings. Among these
Augustin, Calvin, and Luther are the most conspicuous.

St. Augustin, the son of a pious
mother and a heathen father, was led astray into error and vice and wandered
for years through the labyrinth of heresy and scepticism, but his heart was
restless and homesick after God. At last, when he attained to the thirty-third
year of his life (Sept., 386), the fermentation of his soul culminated in a
garden near Milan, far away from his African home, when the Spirit of God,
through the combined agencies of the unceasing prayers of Monica, the sermons
of Ambrose, the example of St. Anthony, the study of Cicero and Plato, of
Isaiah and Paul, brought about a change not indeed as wonderful—for no visible
appearance of Christ was vouchsafed to him—but as sincere and lasting as that
of the apostle. As he was lying in the dust of repentance and wrestling with
God in prayer for deliverance, be suddenly heard a sweet voice as from heaven,
calling out again and again: ’Take and read, take and read!" He opened the holy book and read the
exhortation of Paul: "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." It was a voice of
God; he obeyed it, he completely changed his course of life, and became the
greatest and most useful teacher of his age.

Of Calvin’s conversion we know
very little, but he himself characterizes it as a sudden change (subita conversio) from papal superstition to the
evangelical faith. In this respect it resembles that of Paul rather than
Augustin. He was no sceptic, no heretic, no immoral man, but as far as we know,
a pious Romanist until the brighter life of the Reformation burst on his mind
from the Holy Scriptures and showed him a more excellent way. "Only one
haven of salvation is left for our souls," he says, "and that is the
mercy of God in Christ. We are saved by grace—not by our merits, not by our
works." He consulted not with flesh and blood, and burned the bridge after
him. He renounced all prospects of a brilliant career, and exposed himself to
the danger of persecution and death. He exhorted and strengthened the timid
Protestants of France, usually closing with the words of Paul If God be for us, who can be against
us?" He prepared in Paris a
flaming address on reform, which was ordered to be burned; he escaped from
persecution in a basket from a window, like Paul at Damascus, and wandered for
two years as a fugitive evangelist from place to place until he found his
sphere of labor in Geneva. With his conversion was born his Pauline theology, which
sprang from his brain like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. Paul never had a
more logical and theological commentator than John Calvin.380

But the most Paul-like man in
history is the leader of the German Reformation, who combined in almost equal
proportion depth of mind, strength of will, tenderness of heart, and a fiery
vehemence of temper, and was the most powerful herald of evangelical freedom;
though inferior to Augustin and Calvin (not to say Paul) in self-discipline,
consistency, and symmetry of character.381 Luther’s commentary on the
Epistle to the Galatians, though not a grammatical or logical exposition, is a
fresh reproduction and republication of the Epistle against the
self-righteousness, and bondage of the papacy. Luther’s first conversion took
place in his twenty-first year (1505), when, as a student of law at Erfurt, on
his return from a visit to his parents, he was so frightened by a fearful
thunder-storm and flashes of lightning that he exclaimed: "Help, dear St.
Anna, I will become a monk!" But
that conversion, although it has often been compared with that of the apostle,
had nothing to do with his Paulinism and Protestantism; it made him a pious
Catholic, it induced him to flee from the world to the retreat of a convent for
the salvation of his soul. And he became one of the most humble, obedient, and
self-denying of monks, as Paul was one of the most earnest and zealous of
Pharisees. "If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery," says Luther,
"I ought to have gotten there." But the more he sought righteousness
and peace by ascetic self denial and penal exercises, the more painfully he
felt the weight of sin and the wrath of God, although unable to mention to his
confessor any particular transgression. The discipline of the law drove him to
the brink of despair, when by the kind interposition of Staupitz he was
directed away from himself to the cross of Christ, as the only source of pardon
and peace, and found, by implicit faith in His all-sufficient merits, that
righteousness which he had vainly sought in his own strength.382 This, his second conversion, as we may call it, which occurred
several years later (1508), and gradually rather than suddenly, made him an
evangelical freeman in Christ and prepared him for the great conflict with
Romanism, which began in earnest with the nailing of the ninety-nine theses
against the traffic in indulgences (1517). The intervening years may be
compared to Paul’s sojourn in Arabia and the subordinate labors preceding his
first great missionary tour.

False
Explanations.

Various attempts have been made
by ancient heretics and modern rationalists to explain Paul’s conversion in a
purely natural way, but they have utterly failed, and by their failure they
indirectly confirm the true view as given by the apostle himself and as held in
all ages by the Christian church.383

1. The Theory of Fraud.—The heretical and malignant faction of
the Judaizers was disposed to attribute Paul’s conversion to selfish motives,
or to the influence of evil spirits.

The Ebionites spread the lie
that Paul was of heathen parents, fell in love with the daughter of the high
priest in Jerusalem, became a proselyte and submitted to circumcision in order
to secure her, but failing in his purpose, he took revenge and attacked the
circumcision, the sabbath, and the whole Mosaic law.384

In the pseudo-Clementine
Homilies, which represent a speculative form of the Judaizing heresy, Paul is
assailed under the disguise of Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, who struggled
antinomian heathenism into the church. The manifestation of Christ was either a
manifestation of his wrath, or a deliberate lie.385

2. The Rationalistic Theory of Thunder and Lightning.—It
attributes the conversion to physical causes, namely, a violent storm and the
delirium of a burning Syrian fever, in which Paul superstitiously mistook the
thunder for the voice of God and the lightning for a heavenly vision.386 But the record says nothing
about thunderstorm and fever, and both combined could not produce such an
effect upon any sensible man, much less upon the history of the world. Who ever
heard the thunder speak in Hebrew or in any other articulate language? And had
not Paul and Luke eyes and ears and common sense, as well as we, to distinguish
an ordinary phenomenon of nature from a supernatural vision?

3. The Vision-Hypothesis resolves the conversion into a natural
psychological process and into an honest self-delusion. It is the favorite
theory of modern rationalists, who scorn all other explanations, and profess
the highest respect for the intellectual and moral purity and greatness of
Paul.387 It is certainly more rational and creditable than the
second hypothesis, because it ascribes the mighty change not to outward and
accidental phenomena which pass away, but to internal causes. It assumes that
an intellectual and moral fermentation was going on for some time in the mind
of Paul, and resulted at last, by logical necessity, in an entire change of
conviction and conduct, without any supernatural influence, the very
possibility of which is denied as being inconsistent with the continuity of
natural development. The miracle in this case was simply the mythical and
symbolical reflection of the commanding presence of Jesus in the thoughts of
the apostle.

That Paul saw a vision, he says
himself, but he meant, of course, a real, objective, personal appearance of
Christ from heaven, which was visible to his eyes and audible to his ears, and
at the same time a revelation to his mind through the medium of the senses.388 The inner spiritual manifestation389 was more important than the
external, but both combined produced conviction. The vision-theory turns the
appearance of Christ into a purely subjective imagination, which the apostle
mistook for an objective fact.390

It is incredible that a man of
sound, clear, and keen mind as that of Paul undoubtedly was, should have made
such a radical and far reaching blunder as to confound subjective reflections
with an objective appearance of Jesus whom he persecuted, and to ascribe solely
to an act of divine mercy what he must have known to be the result of his own
thoughts, if he thought at all.

The advocates of this theory
throw the appearances of the risen Lord to the older disciples, the later
visions of Peter, Philip, and John in the Apocalypse, into the same category of
subjective illusions in the high tide of nervous excitement and religious
enthusiasm. It is plausibly maintained that Paul was an enthusiast, fond of
visions and revelations,391 and that he justifies a doubt concerning the realness
of the resurrection itself by putting all the appearances of the risen Christ
on the same level with his own, although several years elapsed between those of
Jerusalem and Galilee, and that on the way to Damascus.

But this, the only possible
argument for the vision-hypothesis, is entirely untenable. When Paul says:
"Last of all, as unto an untimely offspring, Christ appeared to me
also," he draws a clear line of distinction between the personal
appearances of Christ and his own later visions, and closes the former with
the one vouchsafed to him at his conversion.392 Once, and once only, he claims
to have seen the Lord in visible form and to have heard his voice; last,
indeed, and out of due time, yet as truly and really as the older apostles. The
only difference is that they saw the risen Saviour still abiding on earth,
while he saw the ascended Saviour coming down from heaven, as we may expect him
to appear to all men on the last day. It is the greatness of that vision which
leads him to dwell on his personal unworthiness as "the least of the
apostles and not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the
church of God." He uses the realness of Christ’s resurrection as the
basis for his wonderful discussion of the future resurrection of believers,
which would lose all its force if Christ had not actually been raised from the
dead.393

Moreover his conversion
coincided with his call to the apostleship. If the former was a delusion, the
latter must also have been a delusion. He emphasizes his direct call to the
apostleship of the Gentiles by the personal appearance of Christ without any
human intervention, in opposition to his Judaizing adversaries who tried to
undermine his authority.394

The whole assumption of a long
and deep inward preparation, both intellectual and moral, for a change, is
without any evidence, and cannot set aside the fact that Paul was, according to
his repeated confession, at that time violently persecuting Christianity in its
followers. His conversion can be far less explained from antecedent causes,
surrounding circumstances, and personal motives than that of any other
disciple. While the older apostles were devoted friends of Jesus, Paul was his
enemy, bent at the very time of the great change on an errand of cruel
persecution, and therefore in a state of mind most unlikely to give birth to a
vision so fatal to his present object and his future career. How could a
fanatical persecutor of Christianity, "breathing threatenings and
slaughter against the disciples of the Lord," stultify and contradict
himself by an imaginative conceit which tended to the building up of that very
religion which he was laboring to destroy!395

But supposing (with Renan) that
his mind was temporarily upset in the delirium of feverish excitement, he
certainly soon recovered health and reason, and had every opportunity to
correct his error; he was intimate with the murderers of Jesus, who could have
produced tangible evidence against the resurrection if it had never occurred;
and after a long pause of quiet reflection he went to Jerusalem, spent a
fortnight with Peter, and could learn from him and from James, the brother of
Christ, their experience, and compare it with his own. Everything in this case
is against the mythical and legendary theory which requires a change of
environment and the lapse of years for the formation of poetic fancies and
fictions.

Finally, the whole life-work of
Paul, from his conversion at Damascus to his martyrdom in Rome, is the best
possible argument against this hypothesis and for the realness of his
conversion, as an act of divine grace. "By their fruits ye shall know
them." How could such an effective change proceed from an empty dream? Can an illusion change the current of
history? By joining the Christian sect
Paul sacrificed everything, at last life itself, to the service of Christ. He
never wavered in his conviction of the truth as revealed to him, and by his
faith in this revelation he has become a benediction to all ages.

The vision-hypothesis denies
objective miracles, but ascribes miracles to subjective imaginations, and makes
a he more effect ive and beneficial than the truth.

All rationalistic and natural
interpretations of the conversion of Paul turn out to be irrational and
unnatural; the supernatural interpretation of Paul himself, after all, is the
most rational and natural.

Remarkable
Concessions.

Dr. Baur, the master-spirit of skeptical criticism and the
founder of the "Tübingen School," felt constrained, shortly before
his death (1860), to abandon the vision-hypothesis and to admit that "no
psychological or dialectical analysis can explore the inner mystery of the act
in which God revealed his Son in Paul (keine,
weder psychologische noch dialektische Analyse kann das innere Geheimniss des
Actes erforschen, in welchem Gott seinen Sohn in ihm enthülte). In the same connection
he says that in, "the sudden transformation of Paul from the most violent
adversary of Christianity into its most determined herald" he could see
"nothing short of a miracle (Wunder);" and adds that
"this miracle appears all the greater when we remember that in this
revulsion of his consciousness he broke through the barriers of Judaism and
rose out of its particularism into the universalism of Christianity."396 This frank confession is creditable to the head and heart of the
late Tübingen critic, but is fatal to his whole anti-supernaturalistic theory
of history. Si falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. If we admit the
miracle in one case, the door is opened for all other miracles which rest on
equally strong evidence.

The late Dr. Keim, an independent pupil of Baur,
admits at least spiritual manifestations of the ascended Christ from heaven,
and urges in favor of the objective reality of the Christophanies as
reported by Paul, 1 Cor. 15:3 sqq., "the whole character of Paul, his
sharp understanding which was not weakened by his enthusiasm, the careful,
cautious, measured, simple form of his statement, above all the favorable total
impression of his narrative and the mighty echo of it in the unanimous,
uncontradicted faith of primitive Christendom."397

Dr. Schenkel, of Heidelberg, in his latest stage of development,
says that Paul, with full justice, put his Christophany on a par with the
Christophanies of the older apostles; that all these Christophanies are not
simply the result of psychological processes, but "remain in many respects
psychologically inconceivable," and point back to the historic background
of the person of Jesus; that Paul was not an ordinary visionary, but carefully
distinguished the Christophany at Damascus from his later visions; that he
retained the full possession of his rational mind even in the moments of the
highest exaltation; that his conversion was not the sudden effect of nervous
excitement, but brought about by the influence of the divine Providence which
quietly prepared his soul for the reception of Christ; and that the appearance
of Christ vouchsafed to him was "no dream, but reality."398

Canon Farrar says (I. 195): "One fact remains upon
any hypothesis and that is, that the conversion of St. Paul was in the highest
sense of the word a miracle, and one of which the spiritual consequences have
affected every subsequent age of the history of mankind."

§ 32. The Work of Paul.

"He who can
part from country and from kin,
And scorn delights, and tread the thorny way,

A heavenly crown,
through toil and pain, to win—
He who reviled can tender love repay,
And buffeted, for bitter foes can pray—

He who, upspringing
at his Captain’s call,
Fights the good fight, and when at last the day
Of fiery trial comes, can nobly fall—

Such were a saint—or
more—and such the holy Paul!"

—Anon.

The conversion of Paul was a
great intellectual and moral revolution, yet without destroying his identity.
His noble gifts and attainments remained, but were purged of Selfish motives,
inspired by a new principle, and consecrated to a divine end. The love of
Christ who saved him, was now his all-absorbing passion, and no sacrifice was
too great to manifest his gratitude to Him. The architect of ruin became an
architect of the temple of God. The same vigor, depth and acuteness of mind,
but illuminated by the Holy Spirit; the same strong temper and burning zeal,
but cleansed, subdued and controlled by wisdom and moderation; the same energy
and boldness, but coupled with gentleness and meekness; and, added to all this,
as crowning gifts of grace, a love and humility, a tenderness and delicacy of
feeling such as are rarely, if ever, found in a character so proud, manly and
heroic. The little Epistle to Philemon reveals a perfect Christian gentleman, a
nobleman of nature, doubly ennobled by grace. The thirteenth chapter of the
first Epistle to the Corinthians could only be conceived by a mind that had
ascended on the mystic ladder of faith to the throbbing heart of the God of
love; yet without inspiration even Paul could not have penned that seraphic
description of the virtue which beareth all things, believeth all things,
hopeth all things, endureth all things, which never faileth, but will last for
ever the greatest in the triad of celestial graces: faith, hope, love.

Saul converted became at once
Paul the missionary. Being saved himself, he made it his life-work to save
others. "Straight way" he proclaimed Christ in the synagogues, and
confounded the Jews of Damascus, proving that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah,
the Son of God.400 But this was
only a preparatory testimony in the fervor of the first love. The appearance of
Christ, and the travails of his soul during the three days and nights of prayer
and fasting, when he experienced nothing less than a spiritual death and a
spiritual resurrection, had so shaken his physical and mental frame that he
felt the need of protracted repose away from the noise and turmoil of the
world. Besides there must have been great danger threatening his life as soon
as the astounding news of his conversion became known at Jerusalem. He therefore
went to the desert of Arabia and spent there three years,401 not in missionary labor (as
Chrysostom thought), but chiefly in prayer, meditation and the study of the
Hebrew Scriptures in the light of their fulfilment through the person and work
of Jesus of Nazareth. This retreat took the place of the three years’
preparation of the Twelve in the school of Christ. Possibly he may have gone as
far as Mount Sinai, among the wild children of Hagar and Ishmael.402 On that pulpit of the great
lawgiver of Israel, and in view of the surrounding panorama of death and
desolation which reflects the terrible majesty of Jehovah, as no other spot on
earth, he could listen with Elijah to the thunder and earthquake, and the still
small voice, and could study the contrast between the killing letter and the
life-giving spirit, between the ministration of death and the ministration of
righteousness.403 The desert, like the ocean, has its grandeur and
sublimity, and leaves the meditating mind alone with God and eternity.

"Paul was a unique man for
a unique task."404 His task was twofold: practical and theoretical. He preached
the gospel of free and universal grace from Damascus to Rome, and secured its
triumph in the Roman empire, which means the civilized world of that age. At
the same time he built up the church from within by the exposition and defence
of the gospel in his Epistles. He descended to the humblest details of
ecclesiastical administration and discipline, and mounted to the sublimest
heights of theological speculation. Here we have only to do with his missionary
activity; leaving his theoretical work to be considered in another chapter.

Let us first glance at his
missionary spirit and policy.

His inspiring motive was love to
Christ and to his fellow-men. "The love of Christ," he says,
"constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore
all died: and He died for all that they who live should no longer live unto
themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again." He
regarded himself as a bondman and ambassador of Christ, entreating men to be
reconciled to God. Animated by this spirit, he became "as a Jew to the
Jews, as a Gentile to the Gentiles, all things to all men that by all means he
might save some."

He made Antioch, the capital of
Syria and the mother church of Gentile Christendom, his point of departure for,
and return from, his missionary journeys, and at the same time he kept up his
connection with Jerusalem, the mother church of Jewish Christendom. Although an
independent apostle of Christ, he accepted a solemn commission from Antioch for
his first great missionary tour. He followed the current of history, commerce,
and civilization, from East to West, from Asia to Europe, from Syria to Asia
Minor, Greece, Italy, and perhaps as far as Spain.405 In the larger and more influential cities, Antioch, Ephesus,
Corinth, Rome, he resided a considerable time. From these salient points he
sent the gospel by his pupils and fellow-laborers into the surrounding towns
and villages. But he always avoided collision with other apostles, and sought
new fields of labor where Christ was not known before, that he might not build
on any other man’s foundation. This is true independence and missionary
courtesy, which is so often, alas! violated by missionary societies inspired by
sectarian rather than Christian zeal.

His chief mission was to the
Gentiles, without excluding the Jews, according to the message of Christ
delivered through Ananias: "Thou shalt bear my name before the Gentiles,
and kings, and the children of Israel." Considering that the Jews had a
prior claim in time to the gospel,406 and that the synagogues in
heathen cities were pioneer stations for Christian missions, he very naturally
addressed himself first to the Jews and proselytes, taking up the regular
lessons of the Old Testament Scriptures, and demonstrating their fulfilment in
Jesus of Nazareth. But almost uniformly he found the half-Jews, or
"proselytes of the gate," more open to the gospel than his own
brethren; they were honest and earnest seekers of the true religion, and formed
the natural bridge to the pure heathen, and the nucleus of his congregations,
which were generally composed of converts from both religions.

In noble self-denial he earned
his subsistence with his own hands, as a tent-maker, that he might not be
burthensome to his congregations (mostly belonging to the lower classes), that
he might preserve his independence, stop the mouths of his enemies, and testify
his gratitude to the infinite mercy of the Lord, who had called him from his
headlong, fanatical career of persecution to the office of an apostle of free
grace. He never collected money for himself, but for the poor Jewish Christians
in Palestine. Only as an exception did he receive gifts from his converts at
Philippi, who were peculiarly dear to him. Yet he repeatedly enjoins upon the
churches to care for the liberal temporal support of their teachers who break
to them the bread of eternal life. The Saviour of the world a carpenter! the
greatest preacher of the gospel a tent-maker!

Of the innumerable difficulties,
dangers, and sufferings which he encountered with Jews, heathens, and false
brethren, we can hardly form an adequate idea; for the book of Acts is only a
summary record. He supplements it incidentally. "Of the Jews five times
received I forty stripes save one. Three times was I beaten with rods, once was
I stoned, three times I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in
the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in
perils from my countrymen, in perils from the heathen, in perils in the city,
in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false
brethren: in labor and toil, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in
fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides those things that are without,
there is that which presseth upon me daily, the anxious care for all the
churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak?
Who is offended, and I burn not?"407 Thus he wrote reluctantly to the Corinthians, in self-vindication
against his calumniators, in the year 57, before his longest and hardest trial
in the prisons of Caesarea and Rome, and at least seven years before his
martyrdom. He was "pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed,
yet not in despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed."408 His whole public career was a continuous warfare. He represents
the church militant, or "marching and conquering Christianity." He
was "unus
versus mundum,"
in a far higher sense than this has been said of Athanasius the Great when
confronted with the Arian heresy and the imperial heathenism of Julian the
Apostate.

Yet he was never unhappy, but full of joy and peace. He
exhorted the Philippians from his prison in Rome: "Rejoice in the Lord
alway; again I will say, Rejoice." In all his conflicts with foes from
without and foes from within Paul was "more than conqueror" through
the grace of God which was sufficient for him. "For I am persuaded,"
he writes to the Romans in the strain of a sublime ode of triumph, "that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature
shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord."409 And his dying
word is an assurance of victory: "I have fought the good fight, I have
finished the course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me
the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me
at that day: and not only to me, but also to all them that have loved his
appearing."410

§ 33. Paul’s Missionary Labors.

The public life of Paul, from
the third year after his conversion to his martyrdom, a.d. 40–64, embraces a quarter of a century, three great
missionary campaigns with minor expeditions, five visits to Jerusalem, and at
least four years of captivity in Caesarea and Rome. Some extend it to a.d. 67 or 68. It may be divided into
five or six periods, as follows:

1. a.d. 40–44. The period of preparatory labors in Syria and his
native Cilicia, partly alone, partly in connection with Barnabas, his senior
fellow-apostle among the Gentiles.

On his return from the Arabian
retreat Paul began his public ministry in earnest at Damascus, preaching Christ
on the very spot where he had been converted and called. His testimony enraged
the Jews, who stirred up the deputy of the king of Arabia against him, but he
was saved for future usefulness and let down by the brethren in a basket
through a window in the wall of the city.411 Three years after his conversion he went up to Jerusalem to make
the acquaintance of Peter and spent a fortnight with him. Besides him he saw
James the brother of the Lord. Barnabas introduced him to the disciples, who at
first were afraid of him, but when they heard of his marvellous conversion they
"glorified God" that their persecutor was now preaching the faith he
had once been laboring to destroy.412 He did not come to learn the gospel, having received it already
by revelation, nor to be confirmed or ordained, having been called "not
from men, or through man, but through Jesus Christ." Yet his interview
with Peter and James, though barely mentioned, must have been fraught with the
deepest interest. Peter, kind-hearted and generous as he was, would naturally
receive him with joy and thanksgiving. He had himself once denied the Lord—not
malignantly but from weakness—as Paul had persecuted the disciples—ignorantly
in unbelief. Both had been mercifully pardoned, both had seen the Lord, both
were called to the highest dignity, both could say from the bottom of the
heart: "Lord thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee."
No doubt they would exchange their experiences and confirm each other in their
common faith.

It was probably on this visit
that Paul received in a vision in the temple the express command of the Lord to
go quickly unto the Gentiles.413 Had he stayed longer at the seat of the Sanhedrin, he would
undoubtedly have met the fate of the martyr Stephen.

He visited Jerusalem a second
time during the famine under Claudius, in the year 44, accompanied by Barnabas,
on a benevolent mission, bearing a collection of the Christians at Antioch for
the relief of the brethren in Judaea.414 On that occasion he probably saw none of the apostles on account
of the persecution in which James was beheaded, and Peter imprisoned.

The greater part of these four
years was spent in missionary work at Tarsus and Antioch.

2. a.d. 45–50. First missionary journey. In the year 45 Paul
entered upon the first great missionary journey, in company with Barnabas and
Mark, by the direction of the Holy Spirit through the prophets of the
congregation at Antioch. He traversed the island of Cyprus and several
provinces of Asia Minor. The conversion of the Roman proconsul, Sergius Paulus,
at Paphos; the rebuke and punishment of the Jewish sorcerer, Elymas; the marked
success of the gospel in Pisidia, and the bitter opposition of the unbelieving
Jews; the miraculous healing of a cripple at Lystra; the idolatrous worship
there offered to Paul and Barnabas by the superstitious heathen, and its sudden
change into hatred against them as enemies of the gods; the stoning of the
missionaries, their escape from death, and their successful return to Antioch,
are the leading incidents of this tour, which is fully described in Acts 13 and
14.

This period closes with the
important apostolic conference at Jerusalem, a.d.
50, which will require separate consideration in the next section.

3. From a.d. 51–54. Second missionary journey. After the council at
Jerusalem and the temporary adjustment of the difference between the Jewish and
Gentile branches of the church, Paul undertook, in the year 51, a second great
journey, which decided the Christianization of Greece. He took Silas for his
companion. Having first visited his old churches, he proceeded, with the help
of Silas and the young convert, Timothy, to establish new ones through the
provinces of Phrygia and Galatia, where, notwithstanding his bodily infirmity,
he was received with open arms like an angel of God.

From Troas, a few miles south of
the Homeric Troy and the entrance to the Hellespont, he crossed over to Greece
in answer to the Macedonian cry:
"Come over and help us!"
He preached the gospel with great success, first in Philippi, where he
converted the purple dealer, Lydia, and the jailor, and was imprisoned with
Silas, but miraculously delivered and honorably released; then in Thessalonica,
where he was persecuted by the Jews, but left a flourishing church; in Beraea,
where the converts showed exemplary zeal in searching the Scriptures. In
Athens, the metropolis of classical literature, he reasoned with Stoic and
Epicurean philosophers, and unveiled to them on Mars’ Hill (Areopagus), with
consummate tact and wisdom, though without much immediate success, the
"unknown God," to whom the Athenians, in their superstitious anxiety
to do justice to all possible divinities, had unconsciously erected an altar,
and Jesus Christ, through whom God will judge the world in righteousness.415 In Corinth, the commercial bridge between the East and the West,
a flourishing centre of wealth and culture, but also a sink of vice and
corruption, the apostle spent eighteen months, and under almost insurmountable
difficulties he built up a church, which exhibited all the virtues and all the
faults of the Grecian character under the influence of the gospel, and which he
honored with two of his most important Epistles.416

In the spring of 54 he returned
by way of Ephesus, Caesarea, and Jerusalem to Antioch.

During this period he composed
the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which are the earliest of his literary
remains excepting his missionary addresses preserved in the Acts.

4. a.d. 54–58. Third missionary tour. Towards the close of the
year 54 Paul went to Ephesus, and in this renowned capital of proconsular Asia
and of the worship of Diana, he fixed for three years the centre of his
missionary work. He then revisited his churches in Macedonia and Achaia, and
remained three months more in Corinth and the vicinity.

During this period he wrote the
great doctrinal Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, which mark
the height of his activity and usefulness.

5. a.d. 58–63. The period of his two imprisonments, with the
intervening winter voyage from Caesarea to Rome. In the spring of 58 he
journeyed, for the fifth and last time, to Jerusalem, by way of Philippi,
Troas, Miletus (where he delivered his affecting valedictory to the Ephesian
presbyter-bishops), Tyre, and Caesarea, to carry again to the poor brethren in
Judaea a contribution from the Christians of Greece, and by this token of
gratitude and love to cement the two branches of the apostolic church more
firmly together.

But some fanatical Jews, who
bitterly bated him as an apostate and a seducer of the people, raised an uproar
against him at Pentecost; charged him with profaning the temple, because he had
taken into it an uncircumcised Greek, Trophimus; dragged him out of the
sanctuary, lest they should defile it with blood, and would undoubtedly have
killed him had not Claudius Lysias, the Roman tribune, who lived near by, come
promptly with his soldiers to the spot. This officer rescued Paul, out of
respect for his Roman citizenship, from the fury of the mob, set him the next
day before the Sanhedrin, and after a tumultuous and fruitless session of the
council, and the discovery of a plot against his life, sent him, with a strong
military guard and a certificate of innocence, to the procurator Felix in
Caesarea.

Here the apostle was confined
two whole years (58–60), awaiting his trial before the Sanhedrin, uncondemned,
occasionally speaking before Felix, apparently treated with comparative
mildness, visited by the Christians, and in some way not known to us promoting
the kingdom of God.417

After the accession of the new
and better procurator, Festus, who is known to have succeeded Felix in the year
60, Paul, as a Roman citizen, appealed to the tribunal of Caesar and thus
opened the way to the fulfilment of his long-cherished desire to preach the
Saviour of the world in the metropolis of the world. Having once more testified
his innocence, and spoken for Christ in a masterly defence before Festus, King
Herod Agrippa II. (the last of the Herods), his sister Bernice, and the most
distinguished men of Caesarea, he was sent in the autumn of the year 60 to the
emperor. He had a stormy voyage and suffered shipwreck, which detained him over
winter at Malta. The voyage is described with singular minuteness and nautical
accuracy by Luke as an eye-witness. In the month of March of the year 61, the
apostle, with a few faithful companions, reached Rome, a prisoner of Christ,
and yet freer and mightier than the emperor on the throne. It was the seventh
year of Nero’s reign, when he had already shown his infamous character by the
murder of Agrippina, his mother, in the previous year, and other acts of
cruelty.

In Rome Paul spent at least two
years till the spring of 63, in easy confinement, awaiting the decision of his
case, and surrounded by friends and fellow-laborers "in his own hired
dwelling." He preached the gospel to the soldiers of the imperial
body-guard, who attended him; sent letters and messages to his distant churches
in Asia Minor and Greece; watched over all their spiritual affairs, and
completed in bonds his apostolic fidelity to the Lord and his church.418

In the Roman prison he wrote the
Epistles to the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Philemon.

6. a.d. 63 and 64. With the second year of Paul’s imprisonment
in Rome the account of Luke breaks off, rather abruptly, yet appropriately and
grandly. Paul’s arrival in Rome secured the triumph of Christianity. In this
sense it was true, "Roma locuta est, causa finita est." And he
who spoke at Rome is not dead; he is still "preaching (everywhere) the
kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, with
all boldness, none forbidding him."419

But what became of him after the
termination of those two years in the spring of 63? What was the result of the trial so long delayed? Was he condemned to death? or was he released
by Nero’s tribunal, and thus permitted to labor for another season? This question is still unsettled among
scholars. A vague tradition says that Paul was acquitted of the charge of the
Sanhedrin, and after travelling again in the East, perhaps also into Spain, was
a second time imprisoned in Rome and condemned to death. The assumption of a
second Roman captivity relieves certain difficulties in the Pastoral Epistles;
for they seem to require a short period of freedom between the first and a
second Roman captivity, and a visit to the East,420 which is not recorded in the
Acts, but which the apostle contemplated in case of his release.421 A visit to Spain, which he intended, is possible, though less
probable.422 If he was set
at liberty, it must have been before the terrible persecution in July, 64,
which would not have spared the great leader of the Christian sect. It is a
remarkable coincidence that just about the close of the second year of Paul’s
confinement, the celebrated Jewish historian, Josephus, then in his 27th year,
came to Rome (after a tempestuous voyage and shipwreck), and effected through
the influence of Poppaea (the wife of Nero and a half proselyte of Judaism) the
release of certain Jewish priests who had been sent to Rome by Felix as
prisoners.423 It is not
impossible that Paul may have reaped the benefit of a general release of Jewish
prisoners.

The martyrdom of Paul under Nero
is established by the unanimous testimony of antiquity. As a Roman citizen, he
was not crucified, like Peter, but put to death by the sword.424 The scene of his martyrdom is laid by tradition about three miles
from Rome, near the Ostian way, on a green spot, formerly called Aquae Salviae, afterwards Tre
Fontane, from
the three fountains which are said to have miraculously gushed forth from the
blood of the apostolic martyr. His relics were ultimately removed to the
basilica of San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura, built by Theodosius and Valentinian in
388, and recently reconstructed. He lies outside of Rome, Peter inside. His
memory is celebrated, together with that of Peter, on the 29th and 30th of
June.425 As to the year
of his death, the views vary from a.d.
64 to 69. The difference of the place and manner of his martyrdom suggests that
he was condemned by a regular judicial trial, either shortly before, or more
probably a year or two after the horrible wholesale massacre of Christians on
the Vatican hill, in which his Roman citizenship would not have been regarded.
If he was released in the spring of 63, he had a year and a half for another
visit to the East and to Spain before the outbreak of the Neronian persecution
(after July, 64); but tradition favors a later date. Prudentius separates the
martyrdom of Peter from that of Paul by one year. After that persecution the
Christians were everywhere exposed to danger.426

Assuming the release of Paul and
another visit to the East, we must locate the First Epistle to Timothy and the
Epistle to Titus between the first and second Roman captivity, and the Second
Epistle to Timothy in the second captivity. The last was evidently written in
the certain view of approaching martyrdom; it is the affectionate farewell of
the aged apostle to his beloved Timothy, and his last will and testament to the
militant church below in the bright prospect of the unfading crown in the
church triumphant above.427

Thus ended the earthly course of
this great teacher of nations, this apostle of victorious faith, of evangelical
freedom, of Christian progress. It was the heroic career of a spiritual
conqueror of immortal souls for Christ, converting them from the service of sin
and Satan to the service of the living God, from the bondage of the law to the
freedom of the gospel, and leading them to the fountain of life eternal. He
labored more abundantly than all the other apostles; and yet, in sincere
humility, he considered himself "the least of the apostles," and
"not meet to be called an apostle," because he persecuted the church
of God; a few years later he confessed: "I am less than the least of all
saints," and shortly before his death: "I am the chief of
sinners."428 His humility
grew as he experienced God’s mercy and ripened for heaven. Paul passed a
stranger and pilgrim through this world, hardly observed by the mighty and the
wise of his age. And yet how infinitely more noble, beneficial, and enduring
was his life and work than the dazzling march of military conquerors, who,
prompted by ambitions absorbed millions of treasure and myriads of lives, only
to die at last in a drunken fit at Babylon, or of a broken heart on the rocks
of St. Helena! Their empires have long
since crumbled into dust, but St. Paul still remains one of the foremost
benefactors of the human race, and the pulses of his mighty heart are beating
with stronger force than ever throughout the Christian world.

Note on
the Second Roman Captivity of Paul.

The question of a second Roman
captivity of Paul is a purely historical and critical problem, and has no
doctrinal or ethical bearing, except that it facilitates the defence of the
genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles. The best scholars are still divided on
the subject. Neander, Gieseler, Bleek, Ewald, Lange, Sabatier, Godet, also
Renan (Saint Paul, p. 560, and L’Antechrist, p. 106), and nearly
all English biographers and commentators, as Alford, Wordsworth, Howson, Lewin,
Farrar, Plumptre, Ellicott, Lightfoot, defend the second captivity, and thus
prolong the labors of Paul for a few years. On the other hand not only radical
and skeptical critics, as Baur, Zeller, Schenkel, Reuss, Holtzmann, and all who
reject the Pastoral Epistles (except Renan), but also conservative exegetes and
historians, as Niedner, Thiersch, Meyer, Wieseler, Ebrard, Otto, Beck,
Pressensé, deny the second captivity. I have discussed the problem at length in
my Hist. of the Apost. Church, § 87, pp. 328–347, and spin in my
annotations to Lange on Romans, pp. 10–12. I will restate the chief
arguments in favor of a second captivity, partly in rectification of my former
opinion.

1. The main argument are the Pastoral
Epistles, if genuine, as I hold them to be, notwithstanding all the objections
of the opponents from De Wette (1826) and Baur (1835) to Renan (1873) and
Holtzmann (1880). It is, indeed, not impossible to assign them to any known
period in Paul’s life before his captivity, as during his three years’
sojourn in Ephesus (54–57), or his eighteen months’ sojourn in Corinth (52–53),
but it is very difficult to do so. The Epistles presuppose journeys of the
apostle not mentioned in Acts, and belong apparently to an advanced period in
his life, as well as in the history of truth and error in the apostolic church.

2. The release of Timothy from a
captivity in Italy, probably in Rome, to which the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews 13:23 alludes, may have some connection with the release of Paul, who
had probably a share in the inspiration, if not in the composition, of that
remarkable production.

3. The oldest post-apostolic
witness is Clement of Rome, who wrote about 95:, Paul ... having come to the
limit of the West (ejpi; to; tevrma th'"
duvsew" ejlqwn)
and borne witness before the magistrates (marturhvsa" epi; tw'n hJgoumevnwn, which others translate, "having suffered martyrdom
under the rulers"), departed from the world and went to the holy place,
having furnished the sublimest model of endurance" (Ad Corinth. c.
5). Considering that Clement wrote in Rome, the most natural interpretation of tevrma th'" duvsew", "the extreme west," is
Spain or Britain; and as Paul intended to carry the gospel to Spain, one
would first think of that country, which was in constant commercial intercourse
with Rome, and had produced distinguished statesmen and writers like Seneca and
Lucan. Strabo (II. 1) calls the pillars of Hercules pevrata th'" oijkoumevnh"; and Velleius Paterc. calls Spain "extremus nostri orbis terminus."
See Lightfoot, St. Clement, p. 50. But the inference is weakened by the
absence of any trace or tradition of Paul’s visit to Spain.429 Still less can he have suffered martyrdom there, as the logical
order of the words would imply. And as Clement wrote to the Corinthians, he may,
from their geographical standpoint, have called the Roman capital the
end of the West. At all events the passage is rhetorical (it speaks of seven
imprisonments, eJptavki" desma;
forevsa"), and
proves nothing for further labors in the East.430

4. An incomplete passage in the
fragmentary Muratorian canon (about a.d.
170): "Sed profectionem Pauli ab urbe ad Spaniam proficiscentis ..."
seems to imply a journey of Paul to Spain, which Luke has omitted; but this is
merely a conjecture, as the verb has to be supplied. Comp., however, Westcott, The
Canon of the N. Test., p. 189, and Append. C., p. 467, and Renan, L’Antechrist,
p. 106 sq.

5. Eusebius (d. 310) first
clearly asserts that "there is a tradition (lovgo" e[cei) that the apostle, after his defence, again set forth to the ministry of
his preaching and having entered a second time the same city [Rome], was perfected
by his martyrdom before him [Nero]." Hist. Eccl. II. 22 (comp. ch.
25). But the force of this testimony is weakened first by its late date;
secondly, by the vague expression lovgo"
e[cei, "it is
said," and the absence of any reference to older authorities (usually
quoted by Eusebius); thirdly, by his misunderstanding of 2 Tim. 4:16, 17, which
he explains in the same connection of a deliverance from the first imprisonment
(as if ajpologiva were identical with aijcmalwsiva); and lastly by his chronological mistake as to the
time of the first imprisonment which, in his "Chronicle," he
misdates a.d. 58, that is, three
years before the actual arrival of Paul in Rome. On the other hand he puts the
conflagration of Rome two years too late, a.d.
66, instead of 64, and the Neronian persecution, and the martyrdom of Paul and
Peter, in the year 70.

6. Jerome (d. 419): "Paul was dismissed by Nero
that he might preach Christ’s gospel also in the regions of the West (in
Occidentis quoque partibus). De Vir. ill. sub Paulus. This
echoes the tevrma th'" duvsew" of Clement. Chrysostom (d.
407), Theodoret, and other fathers assert that Paul went to Spain (Rom. 15:28),
but without adducing any proof.

These post-apostolic
testimonies, taken together, make it very probable, but not historically
certain, that Paul was released after the spring of 63, and enjoyed an Indian
summer of missionary work before his Martyrdom. The only remaining monuments,
as well as the best proof, of this concluding work are the Pastoral Epistles,
if we admit them to be genuine. To my mind the historical difficulties of the
Pastoral Epistles are an argument for rather than against their Pauline origin.
For why should a forger invent difficulties when he might so easily have fitted
his fictions in the frame of the situation known from the Acts and the other
Pauline Epistles? The linguistic and
other objections are by no means insurmountable, and are overborne by the
evidence of the Pauline spirit which animates these last productions of his
pen.

§ 34. The Synod of Jerusalem, and the Compromise between Jewish
and Gentile Christianity.

Literature.

I. Acts 15, and Gal.
2, and the Commentaries thereon.

II. Besides the
general literature already noticed (in §§ 20 and 29), compare the following
special discussions on the Conference of the Apostles, which tend to rectify
the extreme view of Baur (Paulus, ch. V.) and Overbeck (in the fourth
edition of De Wette’s Com. on Acts) on the conflict between Acts 15 and
Gal. 2, or between Petrinism and Paulinism, and to establish the true historic
view of their essential unity in diversity.

Bishop Lightfoot: St. Paul and the Three,
in Com. on Galat., London, 1866 (second ed.), pp. 283–355. The ablest
critical discussion of the problem in the English language.

R. A. Lipsius: Apostelconvent,
in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexikon, I. (1869), pp. 194–207. A clear and sharp
statement of eight apparent contradictions between Acts 15 and Gal. 2. He
admits, however, some elements of truth in the account of Acts, which he uses
to supplement the account of Paul. Schenkel, in his Christusbild der Apostel,
1879, p. 38, goes further, and says, in opposition to Overbeck, who regards the
account of Acts as a Tendenz- Roman, or partisan fiction: "The narrative of Paul is
certainly trustworthy, but one-sided, which was unavoidable, considering his
personal apologetic aim, and passes by in silence what is foreign to that aim.
The narrative of Acts follows oral and written traditions which were already
influenced by later views and prejudices, and it is for this reason unreliable
in part, yet by no means a conscious fiction."

OttoPfleiderer: Der
Paulinismus. Leipzig,
1873, pp. 278 sqq. and 500 sqq. He tones down the differences to innocent
inaccuracies of the Acts, and rejects the idea of "intentional
invention."

C. Weizsäcker (successor of Dr. Baur in
Tübingen, but partly dissenting from him): Das
Apostelconcil in the "Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie" for 1873, pp. 191–246.
And his essay on Paulus und die Gemeinde in Korinth, ibid., 1876, pp. 603–653. In the last
article he concludes (p. 652) that the real opponents of Paul, in Corinth as
well as in Galatia, were not the primitive apostles (as asserted by Baur,
Schwegler, etc.), but a set of fanatics who abused the authority of Peter and the
name of Christ, and imitated the agitation of Jewish proselytizers, as
described by Roman writers.

Theod. Keim: Aus dem
Urchristenthum. Zürich, 1879, Der Apostelkonvent, pp. 64–89. (Comp.
Hilgenfeld’s review in the "Zeitschrift für wissenschaftl.
Theologie," 1879, pp. 100f sqq.)
One of the last efforts of the author of the Leben Jesu von Nazara. Keim goes a step further than
Weizsäcker, strongly maintains the public as well as the private character of
the apostolic agreement, and admits the circumcision of Timothy as a fact. He
also entirely rejects the view of Baur, Weizsäcker, and Overbeck that the
author of Acts derived his information from the Ep. to the Galatians, and
perverted it for his irenic purpose.

F. W. Farrar: The Life and Work of Paul (Lond.,
1879), chs. XXII.-XXIII. (I. 398–454).

WilibaldGrimm: Der
Apostelconvent, in
the "Theol. Studien und Kritiken" (Gotha), for 1880, pp.
405–432. A critical discussion in the right direction. The exegetical essay of Wetzel on Gal. 2:14, 21, in the same
periodical, pp. 433 sqq., bears in part on the same subject.

F. Godet: Com. on the Ep. to the
Romans, vol. I. (1879), pp. 3742, English translation. Able and sound.

KarlWieseler: Zur Gesch. der N. T.lichen
Schrift und des Urchristenthums. Leipzig, 1880, pp. 1–53, on the Corinthian parties and
their relation to the errorists in the Galatians and the Nicolaitans in the
Apocalypse. Learned, acute, and conservative.

Comp. above § 22,
pp. 213 sqq.; my Hist. of the Apost. Church, §§ 67–70, pp. 245–260; and
Excursus on the Controversy between Peter and Paul, in my Com. on the Galat.
2:11–14.

The question of circumcision, or
of the terms of admission of the Gentiles to the Christian church, was a
burning question of the apostolic age. It involved the wider question of the
binding authority of the Mosaic law, yea, the whole relation of Christianity to
Judaism. For circumcision was in the synagogue what baptism is in the church, a
divinely appointed sign and seal of the covenant of man with God, with all its
privileges and responsibilities, and bound the circumcised person to obey the
whole law on pain of forfeiting the blessing promised. Upon the decision of
this question depended the peace of the church within, and the success of the
gospel without. With circumcision, as a necessary condition of church
membership, Christianity would forever have been confined to the Jewish race
with a small minority of proselytes of the gate, or half-Christians while the
abrogation of circumcision and the declaration of the supremacy and sufficiency
of faith in Christ ensured the conversion of the heathen and the catholicity of
Christianity. The progress of Paul’s mission among the Gentiles forced the
question to a solution and resulted in a grand act of emancipation, yet not
without great struggle and temporary reactions.

All the Christians of the first
generation were converts from Judaism or heathenism. It could not be expected
that they should suddenly lose the influence of opposite kinds of religious
training and blend at once in unity. Hence the difference between Jewish and
Gentile Christianity throughout the apostolic age, more or less visible in all
departments of ecclesiastical life, in missions, doctrine, worship, and
government. At the head of the one division stood Peter, the apostle of the
circumcision; at the head of the other, Paul, to whom was intrusted the
apostleship of the uncircumcision. In another form the same difference even yet
appears between the different branches of Christendom. The Catholic church is
Jewish-Christian or Petrine in its character; the Evangelical church is Gentile
or Pauline. And the individual members of these bodies lean to one or the other
of these leading types. Where-ever there is life and motion in a denomination
or sect, there will be at least two tendencies of thought and action—whether
they be called old and new school, or high church and low church, or by any
other party name. In like manner there is no free government without parties.
It is only stagnant waters that never run and overflow, and corpses that never
move.

The relation between these two
fundamental forms of apostolic Christianity is in general that of authority and
freedom, law and gospel, the conservative and the progressive, the objective
and the subjective. These antithetic elements are not of necessity mutually
exclusive. They are mutually complemental, and for perfect life they must
co-exist and co-operate. But in reality they often run to extremes, and then of
course fall into irreconcilable contradiction. Exclusive Jewish Christianity
sinks into Ebionism; exclusive Gentile Christianity into Gnosticism. And these
heresies were by no means confined to the apostolic and post-apostolic ages;
pseudo-Petrine and pseudo-Pauline errors, in ever-varying phases, run more or
less throughout the whole history of the church.

The Jewish converts at first
very naturally adhered as closely as possible to the sacred traditions of their
fathers. They could not believe that the religion of the Old Testament,
revealed by God himself, should pass away. They indeed regarded Jesus as the
Saviour of Gentiles as well as Jews; but they thought Judaism the necessary
introduction to Christianity, circumcision and the observance of the whole
Mosaic law the sole condition of an interest in the Messianic salvation. And,
offensive as Judaism was, rather than attractive, to the heathen, this
principle would have utterly precluded the conversion of the mass of the Gentile
world.431 The apostles
themselves were at first trammelled by this Judaistic prejudice, till taught
better by the special revelation to Peter before the conversion of Cornelius.432

But even after the baptism of
the uncircumcised centurion, and Peter’s defence of it before the church of
Jerusalem, the old leaven still wrought in some Jewish Christians who had
formerly belonged to the rigid and exclusive sect of the Pharisees.433 They came from Judaea to Antioch, and taught the converts of Paul
and Barnabas: "Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye
cannot be saved." They no doubt appealed to the Pentateuch, the universal
Jewish tradition, the circumcision of Christ, and the practice of the Jewish
apostles, and created a serious disturbance. These ex-Pharisees were the same
whom Paul, in the heat of controversy, more severely calls "false brethren
insidiously or stealthily foisted in," who intruded themselves into the
Christian brotherhood as spies and enemies of Christian liberty.434 He clearly distinguishes them not only from the apostles, but
also from the great majority of the brethren in Judaea who sincerely rejoiced
in his conversion and glorified God for it.435 They were a small, but very active and zealous minority, and full
of intrigue. They compassed sea and land to make one proselyte. They were
baptized with water, but not with the Holy Spirit. They were Christians in
name, but narrow-minded and narrow-hearted Jews in fact. They were scrupulous,
pedantic, slavish formalists, ritualists, and traditionalists of the malignant
type. Circumcision of the flesh was to them of more importance than
circumcision of the heart, or at all events an indispensable condition of
salvation.436 Such men could,
of course, not understand and appreciate Paul, but hated and feared him as a
dangerous radical and rebel. Envy and jealousy mixed with their religious
prejudice. They got alarmed at the rapid progress of the gospel among the
unclean Gentiles who threatened to soil the purity of the church. They could
not close their eyes to the fact that the power was fast passing from Jerusalem
to Antioch, and from the Jews to the Gentiles, but instead of yielding to the
course of Providence, they determined to resist it in the name of order and
orthodoxy, and to keep the regulation of missionary operations and the settlement
of the terms of church membership in their own hands at Jerusalem, the holy
centre of Christendom and the expected residence of the Messiah on his return.

Whoever has studied the
twenty-third chapter of Matthew and the pages of church history, and knows human
nature, will understand perfectly this class of extra-pious and extra-orthodox
fanatics, whose race is not dead yet and not likely to die out. They serve,
however, the good purpose of involuntarily promoting the cause of evangelical
liberty.

The agitation of these Judaizing
partisans and zealots brought the Christian church, twenty years after its
founding, to the brink of a split which would have seriously impeded its
progress and endangered its final success.

The
Conferences in Jerusalem.

To avert this calamity and to
settle this irrepressible conflict, the churches of Jerusalem and Antioch
resolved to hold a private and a public conference at Jerusalem. Antioch sent
Paul and Barnabas as commissioners to represent the Gentile converts. Paul,
fully aware of the gravity of the crisis, obeyed at the same time an inner and
higher impulse.437 He also took
with him Titus, a native Greek, as a living specimen of what the Spirit of God
could accomplish without circumcision. The conference was held a.d. 50 or 51 (fourteen years after
Paul’s conversion). It was the first and in some respects the most important
council or synod held in the history of Christendom, though differing widely
from the councils of later times. It is placed in the middle of the book of
Acts as the connecting link between the two sections of the apostolic church
and the two epochs of its missionary history.

The object of the Jerusalem
consultation was twofold: first, to settle the personal relation between the
Jewish and Gentile apostles, and to divide their field of labor; secondly, to
decide the question of circumcision, and to define the relation between the
Jewish and Gentile Christians. On the first point (as we learn from Paul) it
effected a complete and final, on the second point (as we learn from Luke) a
partial and temporary settlement. In the nature of the case the public
conference in which the whole church took part, was preceded and accompanied by
private consultations of the apostles.438

1. Apostolic Recognition. The
pillars of the Jewish Church, James, Peter, and John439—whatever their views may have
been before—were fully convinced by the logic of events in which they
recognized the hand of Providence that Paul as well as Barnabas by the
extraordinary success of his labors had proven himself to be divinely called to
the apostolate of the Gentiles. They took no exception and made no addition to
his gospel. On the contrary, when they saw that God who gave grace and strength
to Peter for the apostleship of the circumcision, gave grace and strength to
Paul also for the conversion of the uncircumcision, they extended to him and to
Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, with the understanding that they would
divide as far as practicable the large field of labor, and that Paul should
manifest his brotherly love and cement the union by aiding in the support of
the poor, often persecuted and famine-stricken brethren of Judaea. This service
of charity he had cheerfully done before, and as cheerfully and faithfully did
afterward by raising collections among his Greek congregations and carrying the
money in person to Jerusalem.440 Such is the unequivocal testimony of the fraternal understanding
among the apostles from the mouth of Paul himself. And the letter of the
council officially recognizes this by mentioning "beloved" Barnabas441 and Paul, as "men who have
hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." This double
testimony of the unity of the apostolic church is quite conclusive against the
modern invention of an irreconcilable antagonism between Paul and Peter.442

2. As regards the question of
circumcision and the status of the Gentile Christians, there was a sharp
conflict of opinions in open debate, under the very shadow of the inspired
apostles.443 There was
strong conviction and feeling on both sides, plausible arguments were urged,
charges and countercharges made, invidious inferences drawn, fatal consequences
threatened. But the Holy Spirit was also present, as he is with every meeting
of disciples who come together in the name of Christ, and overruled the
infirmities of human nature which will crop out in every ecclesiastical
assembly.

The circumcision of Titus, as a
test case, was of course strongly demanded by the Pharisaical legalists, but as
strongly resisted by Paul, and not enforced.444 To yield here even for a moment would have been fatal to the
cause of Christian liberty, and would have implied a wholesale circumcision of
the Gentile converts, which was impossible.

But how could Paul consistently
afterwards circumcise Timothy?445 The answer is that he circumcised Timothy as a Jew, not as a
Gentile, and that he did it as a voluntary act of expediency, for the purpose
of making Timothy more useful among the Jews, who had a claim on him as the son
of a Jewish mother, and would not have allowed him to teach in a synagogue
without this token of membership; while in the case of Titus, a pure Greek,
circumcision was demanded as a principle and as a condition of justification
and salvation. Paul was inflexible in resisting the demands of false
brethren, but always willing to accommodate himself to weak brethren, and
to become as a Jew to the Jews and as a Gentile to the Gentiles in order to
save them both.446 In genuine
Christian freedom he cared nothing for circumcision or uncircumcision as a mere
rite or external condition, and as compared with the keeping of the
commandments of God and the new creature in Christ.447

In the debate Peter, of course,
as the oecumenical chief of the Jewish apostles, although at that time no more
a resident of Jerusalem, took a leading part, and made a noble speech which
accords entirely with his previous experience and practice in the house of
Cornelius, and with his subsequent endorsement of Paul’s doctrine.448 He was no logician, no rabbinical scholar, but he had admirable
good sense and practical tact, and quickly perceived the true line of progress
and duty. He spoke in a tone of personal and moral authority, but not of
official primacy.449 He protested
against imposing upon the neck of the Gentile disciples the unbearable yoke of
the ceremonial law, and laid down, as clearly as Paul, the fundamental
principle that "Jews as well as Gentiles are saved only by the grace of
the Lord Jesus Christ."450

After this bold speech, which
created a profound silence in the assembly, Barnabas and Paul reported, as the
best practical argument, the signal miracles which God had wrought among the
Gentiles through their instrumentality.

The last and weightiest speaker
was James, the brother of the Lord, the local head of the Jewish Christian
church and bishop of Jerusalem, who as such seems to have presided over the
council. He represented as it were the extreme right wing of the Jewish church
bordering close on the Judaizing faction. It was through his influence chiefly
no doubt that the Pharisees were converted who created this disturbance. In a
very characteristic speech he endorsed the sentiments of Symeon—he preferred to
call Peter by his Jewish name—concerning the conversion of the Gentiles as
being in accordance with ancient prophecy and divine fore-ordination; but he
proposed a compromise to the effect that while the Gentile disciples should not
be troubled with circumcision, they should yet be exhorted to abstain from
certain practices which were particularly offensive to pious Jews, namely, from
eating meat offered to idols, from tasting blood, or food of strangled animals,
and from every form of carnal uncleanness. As to the Jewish Christians, they
knew their duty from the law, and would be expected to continue in their
time-honored habits.

The address of James differs
considerably from that of Peter, and meant restriction as well as freedom, but
after all it conceded the main point at issue—salvation without circumcision.
The address entirely accords in spirit and language with his own epistle, which
represents the gospel as law, though "the perfect law of freedom,"
with his later conduct toward Paul in advising him to assume the vow of the
Nazarites and thus to contradict the prejudices of the myriads of converted
Jews, and with the Jewish Christian tradition which represents him as the model
of an ascetic saint equally revered by devout Jews and Christians, as the
"Rampart of the People" (Obliam), and the intercessor of Israel who
prayed in the temple without ceasing for its conversion and for the aversion of
the impending doom.451 He had more the
spirit of an ancient prophet or of John the Baptist than the spirit of Jesus
(in whom he did not believe till after the resurrection), but for this very
reason he had most authority over the Jewish Christians, and could reconcile
the majority of them to the progressive spirit of Paul.

The compromise of James was
adopted and embodied in the following brief and fraternal pastoral letter to
the Gentile churches. It is the oldest literary document of the apostolic age
and bears the marks of the style of James:452

"The apostles and the elder
brethren453 unto the brethren who are of the Gentiles in Antioch,
Syria, and Cilicia, greeting: Forasmuch as we have heard, that some who went
out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, to whom we
gave no commandment, it seemed good unto us, having come to be of one accord,
to choose out men and send them unto you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul,
men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. We
have sent therefore Judas and Silas, who themselves also shall tell you the
same things by word of mouth. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us,
to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that ye abstain
from meats sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and
from fornication; from which if ye keep yourselves, it shall be well with you.
Farewell."454

The decree was delivered by four
special messengers, two representing the church at Antioch, Barnabas and Paul,
and two from Jerusalem, Judas Barsabbas and Silas (or Silvanus), and read to
the Syrian and Cilician churches which were agitated by the controversy.455 The restrictions remained in full force at least eight years,
since James reminded Paul of them on his last visit to Jerusalem in 58.456 The Jewish Christians observed them no doubt with few exceptions
till the downfall of idolatry,457 and the Oriental church even to
this day abstains from blood and things strangled; but the Western church never
held itself bound to this part of the decree, or soon abandoned some of its
restrictions.

Thus by moderation and mutual
concession in the spirit of peace and brotherly love a burning controversy was
settled, and a split happily avoided.

Analysis
of the Decree.

The decree of the council was a
compromise and had two aspects: it was emancipatory, and restrictive.

(1.) It was a decree of
emancipation of the Gentile disciples from circumcision and the bondage of the
ceremonial law. This was the chief point in dispute, and so far the decree was
liberal and progressive. It settled the question of principle once and
forever. Paul had triumphed. Hereafter the Judaizing doctrine of the necessity
of circumcision for salvation was a heresy, a false gospel, or a perversion of
the true gospel, and is denounced as such by Paul in the Galatians.

(2.) The decree was restrictive
and conservative on questions of expediency and comparative indifference
to the Gentile Christians. Under this aspect it was a wise and necessary
measure for the apostolic age, especially in the East, where the Jewish element
prevailed, but not intended for universal and permanent use. In Western
churches, as already remarked, it was gradually abandoned, as we learn from
Augustine. It imposed upon the Gentile Christians abstinence from meat offered
to idols, from blood, and from things strangled (as fowls and other animals
caught in snares). The last two points amounted to the same thing. These three
restrictions had a good foundation in the Jewish abhorrence of idolatry, and
every thing connected with it, and in the Levitical prohibition.458 Without them the churches in Judaea would not have agreed to the
compact. But it was almost impossible to carry them out in mixed or in purely
Gentile congregations; for it would have compelled the Gentile Christians to
give up social intercourse with their unconverted kindred and friends, and to
keep separate slaughter-houses, like the Jews, who from fear of contamination
with idolatrous associations never bought meat at the public markets. Paul
takes a more liberal view of this matter—herein no doubt dissenting somewhat
from James—namely, that the eating of meat sacrificed to idols was in itself
indifferent, in view of the vanity of idols; nevertheless he likewise commands
the Corinthians to abstain from such meat out of regard for tender and weak
consciences, and lays down the golden rule: "All things are lawful, but
all things are not expedient; all things are lawful, but all things edify not.
Let no man seek his own, but his neighbor’s good."459

It seems strange to a modern
reader that with these ceremonial prohibitions should be connected the strictly
moral prohibition of fornication.460 But it must be remembered that the heathen conscience as to
sexual intercourse was exceedingly lax, and looked upon it as a matter of indifference,
like eating and drinking, and as sinful only in case of adultery where the
rights of a husband are invaded. No heathen moralist, not even Socrates, or
Plato, or Cicero, condemned fornication absolutely. It was sanctioned by the
worship of Aphrodite at Corinth and Paphos, and practised to her honor by a
host of harlot-priestesses! Idolatry or
spiritual whoredom is almost inseparable from bodily pollution. In the case of
Solomon polytheism and polygamy went hand in hand. Hence the author of the Apocalypse
also closely connects the eating of meat offered to idols with fornication, and
denounces them together.461 Paul had to
struggle against this laxity in the Corinthian congregation, and condemns all
carnal uncleanness as a violation and profanation of the temple of God.462 In this absolute prohibition of sexual impurity we have a
striking evidence of the regenerating and sanctifying influence of
Christianity. Even the ascetic excesses of the post-apostolic writers who
denounced the second marriage as "decent adultery" (eujpreph;" moiceiva), and glorified celibacy as a higher and better
state than honorable wedlock, command our respect, as a wholesome and necessary
reaction against the opposite excesses of heathen licentiousness.

So far then as the Gentile
Christians were concerned the question was settled.

The status of the Jewish
Christians was no subject of controversy, and hence the decree is silent about
them. They were expected to continue in their ancestral traditions and customs
as far as they were at all consistent with loyalty to Christ. They needed no
instruction as to their duty, "for," said James, in his address to
the Council, "Moses from generations of old has in every city those who
preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath."463 And eight years afterwards he and his elders intimated to Paul
that even he, as a Jew, was expected to observe the ceremonial law, and that
the exemption was only meant for the Gentiles.464

But just here was a point where
the decree was deficient. It went far enough for the temporary emergency, and
as far as the Jewish church was willing to go, but not far enough for the cause
of Christian union and Christian liberty in its legitimate development.

Notes.

1. The Apostolic Conference at Jerusalem.—This has been one of
the chief battle-fields of modern historical criticism. The controversy of
circumcision has been fought over again in German, French, Dutch, and English
books and essays, and the result is a clearer insight both into the difference
and into the harmony of the apostolic church.

We have two accounts of the
Conference, one from Paul in the second chapter of the Galatians, and one from
his faithful companion, Luke, in Acts 15. For it is now almost universally
admitted that they refer to the same event. They must be combined to make up a
full history. The Epistle to the Galatians is the true key to the position, the
Archimedian pou' stw'.

The accounts agree as to the
contending parties—Jerusalem and Antioch—the leaders on both sides, the topic
of controversy, the sharp conflict, and the peaceful result.

But in other respects they
differ considerably and supplement each other. Paul, in a polemic vindication
of his independent apostolic authority against his Judaizing antagonists in
Galatia, a few years after the Council (about 56), dwells chiefly on his
personal understanding with the other apostles and their recognition of his
authority, but he expressly hints also at public conferences, which could not
be avoided; for it was a controversy between the churches, and an agreement
concluded by the leading apostles on both sides was of general authority, even
if it was disregarded by a heretical party. Luke, on the other hand, writing
after the lapse of at least thirteen years (about 63) a calm and objective
history of the primitive church, gives (probably from Jerusalem and Antioch
documents, but certainly not from Paul’s Epistles) the official action of the
public assembly, with an abridgment of the preceding debates, without excluding
private conferences; on the contrary he rather includes them; for he reports in
Acts 15:5, that Paul and Barnabas "were received by the church and the
apostles and elders and declared all things that God had done with them," before
he gives an account of the public consultation, ver. 6. In all assemblies,
ecclesiastical and political, the more important business is prepared and
matured by Committees in private conference for public discussion and action;
and there is no reason why the council in Jerusalem should have made an
exception. The difference of aim then explains, in part at least, the omissions
and minor variations of the two accounts, which we have endeavored to adjust in
this section.

The ultra- and pseudo-Pauline
hypercriticism of the Tübingen school in several discussions (by Baur,
Schwegler, Zeller, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, Holsten, Overbeck, Lipsius, Hausrath,
and Wittichen) has greatly exaggerated these differences, and used Paul’s terse
polemic allusions as a lever for the overthrow of the credibility of the Acts.
But a more conservative critical reaction has recently taken place, partly in
the same school (as indicated in the literature above), which tends to
harmonize the two accounts and to vindicate the essential consensus of
Petrinism and Paulinism.

2. The Circumcision of Titus.—We hold with most commentators that
Titus was not circumcised. This is the natural sense of the difficult
and much disputed passage, Gal. 2:3–5, no matter whether we take dev in 2:4 in the explanatory sense (nempe, and that), or in
the usual adversative sense (autem, sed, but). In the
former case the sentence is regular, in the latter it is broken, or designedly
incomplete, and implies perhaps a slight censure of the other apostles, who may
have first recommended the circumcision of Titus as a measure of
prudence and conciliation out of regard to conservative scruples, but desisted
from it on the strong remonstrance of Paul. If we press the hjnagkavsqhcompelled,
in 2:3, such an inference might easily be drawn, but there was in Paul’s mind a
conflict between the duty of frankness and the duty of courtesy to his older
colleagues. So Dr. Lightfoot accounts for the broken grammar of the sentence,
"which was wrecked on the hidden rock of the counsels of the apostles of
the circumcision."

Quite another view was taken by
Tertullian (Adv. Marc., V. 3), and recently by Renan (ch. III. p. 89)
and Farrar (I. 415), namely, that Titus voluntarily submitted to
circumcision for the sake of peace, either in spite of the remonstrance of
Paul, or rather with his reluctant consent. Paul seems to say that Titus
was not circumcised, but implies that he was. This view is based
on the omission of oi\" oujdev in 2:5. The passage then would
have to be supplemented in this way: "But not even Titus was compelled to
be circumcised, but [he submitted to circumcision voluntarily] on
account of the stealthily introduced false brethren, to whom we yielded by way
of submission for an hour [i.e., temporarily]." Renan thus explains the
meaning: "If Titus was circumcised, it is not because he was forced, but
on account of the false brethren, to whom we might yield for a moment without
submitting ourselves in principle." He thinks that pro" w{ran is opposed to the following diameivnh/. In other words, Paul stooped to
conquer. He yielded for a moment by a stretch of charity or a stroke of policy,
in order to save Titus from violence, or to bring his case properly before the
Council and to achieve a permanent victory of principle. But this view is
entirely inconsistent not only with the frankness and firmness of Paul on a
question of principle, with the gravity of the crisis, with the uncompromising
tone of the Epistle to the Galatians, but also with the addresses of Peter and James,
and with the decree of the council. If Titus was really circumcised, Paul would
have said so, and explained his relation to the fact. Moreover, the testimony
of Irenaeus and Tertullian against oi|" oujdev must give way to the authority
of the best uncials (a B A C, etc)
and versions in favor of these words. The omission can be better explained from
carelessness or dogmatic prejudice rather than the insertion.

§ 35. The Conservative Reaction, and the Liberal Victory—

Peter and Paul at Antioch.

The Jerusalem compromise, like
every other compromise, was liable to a double construction, and had in it the
seed of future troubles. It was an armistice rather than a final settlement.
Principles must and will work themselves out, and the one or the other must
triumph.

A liberal construction of the
spirit of the decree seemed to demand full communion of the Jewish Christians
with their uncircumcised Gentile brethren, even at the Lord’s table, in the
weekly or daily agapae, on the basis of the common saving faith in Christ,
their common Lord and Saviour. But a strict construction of the letter stopped
with the recognition of the general Christian character of the Gentile
converts, and guarded against ecclesiastical amalgamation on the ground of the
continued obligation of the Jewish converts to obey the ceremonial law,
including the observance of circumcision, of the Sabbath and new moons, and the
various regulations about clean and unclean meats, which virtually forbid
social intercourse with unclean Gentiles.465

The conservative view was
orthodox, and must not be confounded with the Judaizing heresy which demanded
circumcision from the Gentiles as well as the Jews, and made it a term of
church membership and a condition of salvation. This doctrine had been
condemned once for all by the Jerusalem agreement, and was held hereafter only
by the malignant pharisaical faction of the Judaizers.

The church of Jerusalem, being
composed entirely of Jewish converts, would naturally take the conservative
view; while the church of Antioch, where the Gentile element prevailed, would
as naturally prefer the liberal interpretation, which had the certain prospect
of ultimate success. James, who perhaps never went outside of Palestine, far
from denying the Christian character of the Gentile converts, would yet keep
them at a respectful distance; while Peter, with his impulsive, generous
nature, and in keeping with his more general vocation, carried out in practice
the conviction he had so boldly professed in Jerusalem, and on a visit to Antioch,
shortly after the Jerusalem Council (a.d.
51), openly and habitually communed at table with the Gentile brethren.466 He had already once before eaten in the house of the
uncircumcised Cornelius at Caesarea, seeing that "God is no respecter of
persons, but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is
acceptable to him."467

But when some delegates of James468 arrived from Jerusalem and
remonstrated with him for his conduct, he timidly withdrew from fellowship with
the uncircumcised followers of Christ, and thus virtually disowned them. He
unwittingly again denied his Lord from the fear of man, but this time in the
persons of his Gentile disciples. The inconsistency is characteristic of his
impulsive temper, which made him timid or bold according to the nature of the
momentary impression. It is not stated whether these delegates simply carried
out the instructions of James or went beyond them. The former is more probable
from what we know of him, and explains more easily the conduct of Peter, who
would scarcely have been influenced by casual and unofficial visitors. They
were perhaps officers in the congregation of Jerusalem; at all events men of
weight, not Pharisees exactly, yet extremely conservative and cautious, and
afraid of miscellaneous company, which might endanger the purity and orthodoxy
of the venerable mother church of Christendom. They did, of course, not demand
the circumcision of the Gentile Christians, for this would have been in direct
opposition to the synodical decree, but they no doubt reminded Peter of the
understanding of the Jerusalem compact concerning the duty of Jewish
Christians, which he above all others should scrupulously keep. They
represented to him that his conduct was at least very hasty and premature, and
calculated to hinder the conversion of the Jewish nation, which was still the
object of their dearest hopes and most fervent prayers. The pressure must have
been very strong, for even Barnabas, who had stood side by side with Paul at
Jerusalem in the defence of the rights of the Gentile Christians, was
intimidated and carried away by the example of the chief of the apostles.

The subsequent separation of
Paul from Barnabas and Mark, which the author of Acts frankly relates, was no
doubt partly connected with this manifestation of human weakness.469

The sin of Peter roused the
fiery temper of Paul, and called upon him a sharper rebuke than he had received
from his Master. A mere look of pity from Jesus was enough to call forth bitter
tears of repentance. Paul was not Jesus. He may have been too severe in the
manner of his remonstrance, but he knew Peter better than we, and was right in
the matter of dispute, and after all more moderate than some of the greatest and
best men have been in personal controversy. Forsaken by the prince of the
apostles and by his own faithful ally in the Gentile mission, he felt that
nothing but unflinching courage could save the sinking ship of freedom. A vital
principle was at stake, and the Christian standing of the Gentile converts must
be maintained at all hazards, now or never, if the world was to be saved and
Christianity was not to shrink into a narrow corner as a Jewish sect. Whatever
might do in Jerusalem, where there was scarcely a heathen convert, this open
affront to brethren in Christ could not be tolerated for a moment at Antioch in
the church which was of his own planting and full of Hellenists and Gentiles. A
public scandal must be publicly corrected. And so Paul confronted Peter and
charged him with downright hypocrisy in the face of the whole congregation. He
exposed his misconduct by his terse reasoning, to which Peter could make no
reply.470 "If
thou," he said to him in substance, "who art a Jew by nationality and
training, art eating with the Gentiles in disregard of the ceremonial
prohibition, why art thou now, by the moral force of thy example as the chief
of the Twelve, constraining the Gentile converts to Judaize or to conform to
the ceremonial restraints of the elementary religion? We who are Jews by birth and not gross sinners like the heathen,
know that justification comes not from works of the law, but from faith in
Christ. It may be objected that by seeking gratuitous justification instead of
legal justification, we make Christ a promoter of sin.471 Away with this monstrous and blasphemous conclusion! On the contrary, there is sin in returning
to the law for justification after we have abandoned it for faith in Christ. I
myself stand convicted of transgression if I build up again (as thou doest now)
the very law which I pulled down (as thou didst before), and thus condemn my
former conduct. For the law itself taught me to exchange it for Christ, to whom
it points as its end. Through the Mosaic law as a tutor leading me beyond
itself to freedom in Christ, I died to the Mosaic law in order that I might
live a new life of obedience and gratitude to God. I have been crucified with
Christ, and it is no longer my old self that lives, but it is Christ that lives
in me; and the new life of Christ which I now live in this body after my
conversion, I live in the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself
for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God; for if the observance of the law
of Moses or any other human work could justify and save, there was no good
cause of Christ’s death his atoning sacrifice on the cross was needless and
fruitless."

From such a conclusion Peter’s
soul shrank back in horror. He never dreamed of denying the necessity and
efficacy of the death of Christ for the remission of sins. He and Barnabas
stood between two fires on that trying occasion. As Jews they seemed to be
bound by the restrictions of the Jerusalem compromise on which the messengers
of James insisted; but by trying to please the Jews they offended the Gentiles,
and by going back to Jewish exclusiveness they did violence to their better
convictions, and felt condemned by their own conscience.472 They no doubt returned to their more liberal practice.

The alienation of the apostles
was merely temporary. They were too noble and too holy to entertain resentment.
Paul makes honorable mention afterwards of Peter and Barnabas, and also of
Mark, who was a connecting link between the three.473 Peter in his Epistles endorses the teaching of the "beloved
brother Paul," and commends the wisdom of his Epistles, in one of which
his own conduct is so severely rebuked, but significantly adds that there are
some "things in them hard to be understood, which the ignorant and
unsteadfast wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own
destruction."474

The scene of Antioch belongs to
these things which have been often misunderstood and perverted by prejudice and
ignorance in the interest both of heresy and orthodoxy. The memory of it was
perpetuated by the tradition which divided the church at Antioch into two
parishes with two bishops, Evodius and Ignatius, the one instituted by Peter,
the other by Paul. Celsus, Porphyry, and modern enemies of Christianity have
used it as an argument against the moral character and inspiration of the
apostles. The conduct of Paul left a feeling of intense bitterness and resentment
in the Jewish party which manifested itself even a hundred years later in a
violent attack of the pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions upon
Paul, under the disguise of Simon Magus. The conduct of both apostles was so
unaccountable to Catholic taste that some of the fathers substituted an unknown
Cephas for Peter;475 while others resolved the scene into a hypocritical
farce gotten up by the apostles themselves for dramatic effect upon the
ignorant congregation.476

The truth of history requires us
to sacrifice the orthodox fiction of moral perfection in the apostolic church.
But we gain more than we lose. The apostles themselves never claimed, but
expressly disowned such perfection.477 They carried the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, and thus
brought it nearer to us. The infirmities of holy men are frankly revealed in
the Bible for our encouragement as well as for our humiliation. The bold attack
of Paul teaches the right and duty of protest even against the highest
ecclesiastical authority, when Christian truth and principle are endangered;
the quiet submission of Peter commends him to our esteem for his humility and
meekness in proportion to his high standing as the chief among the
pillar-apostles; the conduct of both explodes the Romish fiction of papal
supremacy and infallibility; and the whole scene typically foreshadows the
grand historical conflict between Petrine Catholicism and Pauline
Protestantism, which, we trust, will end at last in a grand Johannean
reconciliation.

Peter and Paul, as far as we
know, never met afterwards till they both shed their blood for the testimony of
Jesus in the capital of the world.

The fearless remonstrance of
Paul had probably a moderating effect upon James and his elders, but did not
alter their practice in Jerusalem.478 Still less did it silence the extreme Judaizing faction; on the
contrary, it enraged them. They were defeated, but not convinced, and fought
again with greater bitterness than ever. They organized a countermission, and
followed Paul into almost every field of his labor, especially to Corinth and
Galatia. They were a thorn, if not the thorn, in his flesh. He has them
in view in all his Epistles except those to the Thessalonians and to Philemon.
We cannot understand his Epistles in their proper historical sense without this
fact. The false apostles were perhaps those very Pharisees who caused the original
trouble, at all events men of like spirit. They boasted of their personal
acquaintance with the Lord in the days of his flesh, and with the primitive
apostles; hence Paul calls these "false apostles" sarcastically
"super-eminent" or "over-extra-apostles."479 They attacked his apostolate as irregular and spurious, and his
gospel as radical and revolutionary. They boldly told his Gentile converts that
the, must submit to circumcision and keep the ceremonial law; in other words,
that they must be Jews as well as Christians in order to insure
salvation, or at all events to occupy a position of pre-eminence over and above
mere proselytes of the gate in the outer court. They appealed, without
foundation, to James and Peter and to Christ himself, and abused their name and
authority for their narrow sectarian purposes, just as the Bible itself is made
responsible for all sorts of heresies and vagaries. They seduced many of the
impulsive and changeable Galatians, who had all the characteristics of the
Keltic race. They split the congregation in Corinth into several parties and
caused the apostle the deepest anxiety. In Colossae, and the churches of
Phrygia and Asia, legalism assumed the milder form of Essenic mysticism and
asceticism. In the Roman church the legalists were weak brethren rather than
false brethren, and no personal enemies of Paul, who treats them much more
mildly than the Galatian errorists.

This bigoted and most persistent
Judaizing reaction was overruled for good. It drew out from the master mind of
Paul the most complete and most profound vindication and exposition of the
doctrines of sin and grace. Without the intrigues and machinations of these
legalists and ritualists we should not have the invaluable Epistles to the
Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. Where error abounded, truth has still more
abounded.

At last the victory was won. The terrible persecution
under Nero, and the still more terrible destruction of Jerusalem, buried the
circumcision controversy in the Christian church. The ceremonial law, which
before Christ was "alive but not life-giving," and which from Christ
to the destruction of Jerusalem was "dying but not deadly," became
after that destruction "dead and deadly."480 The Judaizing heresy was indeed continued outside of the Catholic
church by the sect of the Ebionites during the second century; and in the
church itself the spirit of formalism and bigotry assumed new shapes by substituting
Christian rites and ceremonies for the typical shadows of the Mosaic
dispensation. But whenever and wherever this tendency manifests itself we have
the best antidote in the Epistles of Paul.

§ 36. Christianity in Rome.

I. On the general,
social, and moral condition of Rome under the Emperors:

The Histories of the
Apostolic Age (see pp. 189 sqq.); the Introductions to the Commentaries on Romans
(mentioned p. 281), and a number of critical essays on the origin and
composition of the Church of Rome and the aim of the Epistle to the Romans, by Baur (Ueber Zweck
und Veranlassung des Römerbriefs, 1836; reproduced in his
Paul, I., 346
sqq., Engl. transl.), Beyschlag (Das
geschichtliche Problem des Römerbriefs in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1867), Hilgenfeld (Einleitung
in das N. T., 1875,
pp. 302 sqq.), C. Weizsäcker (Ueber
die älteste römische Christengemeinde, 1876, and his Apost.
Zeitalter, 1886,
pp. 415–467).

Adolf Harnack:
Christianity and Christians at the Court of the Roman Emperors before the
Time of Constantine. In the "Princeton Review," N. York, 1878,
pp. 239–280.

J. Spencer Northcote and W. R. Brownlow
(R. C.): Roma Sotterranea, new ed., London, 1879, vol. I., pp. 78–91. Based
upon Caval. de Rossi’s large
Italian work under the same title (Roma, 1864–1877, in three vols. fol.).
Both important for the remains of early Roman Christianity in the Catacombs.

Formby: Ancient
Rome and its Connect. with the Chr. Rel. Lond., 1880.

Keim: Rom.
u. das Christenthum. Berlin, 1881.

[MAP INSET] From "Roma Sotteranea," by
Northcote and Brownlow.

The
City of Rome.

The city of Rome was to the
Roman empire what Paris is to France, what London to Great Britain: the ruling
head and the beating heart. It had even a more cosmopolitan character than
these modern cities. It was the world in miniature, "orbis in urbe." Rome had conquered nearly
all the nationalities of the then civilized world, and drew its population from
the East and from the West, from the North and from the South. All languages,
religious, and customs of the conquered provinces found a home there. Half the
inhabitants spoke Greek, and the natives complained of the preponderance of
this foreign tongue, which, since Alexander’s conquest, had become the language
of the Orient and of the civilized world.481 The palace of the emperor was the chief centre of Oriental and
Greek life. Large numbers of the foreigners were freedmen, who generally took
the family name of their masters. Many of them became very wealthy, even
millionnaires. The rich freedman was in that age the type of the vulgar,
impudent, bragging upstart. According to Tacitus, "all things vile and
shameful" were sure to flow from all quarters of the empire into Rome as a
common sewer. But the same is true of the best elements: the richest products
of nature, the rarest treasures of art, were collected there; the enterprising
and ambitious youths, the men of genius, learning, and every useful craft found
in Rome the widest field and the richest reward for their talents.

With Augustus began the period
of expensive building. In his long reign of peace and prosperity he changed the
city of bricks into a city of marble. It extended in narrow and irregular
streets on both banks of the Tiber, covered the now desolate and feverish
Campagna to the base of the Albanian hills, and stretched its arms by land and
by sea to the ends of the earth. It was then (as in its ruins it is even now)
the most instructive and interesting city in the world. Poets, orators, and
historians were lavish in the praises of the urbs aeterna,

The estimates of the population
of imperial Rome are guesswork, and vary from one to four millions. But in all
probability it amounted under Augustus to more than a million, and increased
rapidly under the following emperors till it received a check by the fearful
epidemic of 79, which for many days demanded ten thousand victims a day.483 Afterwards the city grew again and reached the height of its
splendor under Hadrian and the Antonines.484

The
Jews in Rome.

The number of Jews in Rome
during the apostolic age is estimated at twenty or thirty thousand souls.485 They all spoke Hellenistic Greek with a strong Hebrew accent.
They had, as far as we know, seven synagogues and three cemeteries, with Greek
and a few Latin inscriptions, sometimes with Greek words in Latin letters, or
Latin words with Greek letters.486 They inhabited the fourteenth region, beyond the Tiber
(Trastevere), at the base of the Janiculum, probably also the island of the
Tiber, and part of the left bank towards the Circus Maximus and the Palatine
hill, in the neighborhood of the present Ghetto or Jewry. They were mostly
descendants of slaves and captives of Pompey, Cassius, and Antony. They dealt
then, as now, in old clothing and broken ware, or rose from poverty to wealth
and prominence as bankers, physicians, astrologers, and fortunetellers. Not a
few found their way to the court. Alityrus, a Jewish actor, enjoyed the highest
favor of Nero. Thallus, a Samaritan and freedman of Tiberius, was able to lend
a million denarii to the Jewish king, Herod Agrippa.487 The relations between the Herods and the Julian and Claudian
emperors were very intimate.

The strange manners and
institutions of the Jews, as circumcision, Sabbath observance, abstinence from
pork and meat sacrificed to the gods whom they abhorred as evil spirits,
excited the mingled amazement, contempt, and ridicule of the Roman historians
and satirists. Whatever was sacred to the heathen was profane to the Jews.488 They were regarded as enemies of the human race. But this, after
all, was a superficial judgment. The Jews had also their friends. Their
indomitable industry and persistency, their sobriety, earnestness, fidelity and
benevolence, their strict obedience to law, their disregard of death in war,
their unshaken trust in God, their hope of a glorious future of humanity, the
simplicity and purity of their worship, the sublimity and majesty of the idea
of one omnipotent, holy, and merciful God, made a deep impression upon
thoughtful and serious persons, and especially upon females (who escaped the
odium of circumcision). Hence the large number of proselytes in Rome and
elsewhere. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, as well as Josephus, testify that many
Romans abstained from all business on the Sabbath, fasted and prayed, burned
lamps, studied the Mosaic law, and sent tribute to the temple of Jerusalem.
Even the Empress Poppaea was inclined to Judaism after her own fashion, and
showed great favor to Josephus, who calls her "devout" or
"God-fearing" (though she was a cruel and shameless woman).489 Seneca, who detested the Jews (calling them sceleratissima gens), was constrained to say that this
conquered race gave laws to their conquerors.490

The Jews were twice expelled
from Rome under Tiberius and Claudius, but soon returned to their transtiberine
quarter, and continued to enjoy the privileges of a religio licita, which were granted to them by
heathen emperors, but were afterwards denied them by Christian popes.491

When Paul arrived in Rome he
invited the rulers of the synagogues to a conference, that he might show them
his good will and give them the first offer of the gospel, but they replied to
his explanations with shrewd reservation, and affected to know nothing of
Christianity, except that it was a sect everywhere spoken against. Their best
policy was evidently to ignore it as much as possible. Yet a large number came
to hear the apostle on an appointed day, and some believed, while the majority,
as usual, rejected his testimony.492

Christianity
in Rome.

From this peculiar people came
the first converts to a religion which proved more than a match for the power
of Rome. The Jews were only an army of defense, the Christians an army of
conquest, though under the despised banner of the cross.

The precise origin of the church
of Rome is involved in impenetrable mystery. We are informed of the beginnings
of the church of Jerusalem and most of the churches of Paul, but we do not know
who first preached the gospel at Rome. Christianity with its missionary
enthusiasm for the conversion of the world must have found a home in the
capital of the world at a very early day, before the apostles left Palestine.
The congregation at Antioch grew up from emigrant and fugitive disciples of
Jerusalem before it was consolidated and fully organized by Barnabas and Paul.

It is not impossible, though by
no means demonstrable, that the first tidings of the gospel were brought to
Rome soon after the birthday of the church by witnesses of the pentecostal
miracle in Jerusalem, among whom were "sojourners from Rome, both Jews and
proselytes."493 In this case
Peter, the preacher of the pentecostal sermon, may be said to have had an indirect
agency in the founding of the church of Rome, which claims him as the rock
on which it is built, although the tradition of his early visit (42) and twenty
or twenty-five years’ residence there is a long exploded fable.494 Paul greets among the brethren in Rome some kinsmen who had been
converted before him, i.e., before 37.495 Several names in the list of Roman brethren to whom he sends
greetings are found in the Jewish cemetery on the Appian Way among the freedmen
of the Empress Livia. Christians from Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece
must have come to the capital for various reasons, either as visitors or settlers.

The
Edict of Claudius.

The first historic trace of
Christianity in Rome we have in a notice of the heathen historian Suetonius,
confirmed by Luke, that Claudius, about a.d.
52, banished the Jews from Rome because of their insurrectionary disposition
and commotion under the instigation of "Chrestus" (misspelt for
"Christus").496

This commotion in all probability
refers to Messianic controversies between Jews and Christians who were not yet
clearly distinguished at that time. The preaching, of Christ, the true King of
Israel, would naturally produce a great commotion among the Jews, as it did at
Antioch, in Pisidia, in Lystra, Thessalonica, and Beraea; and the ignorant
heathen magistrates would as naturally infer that Christ was a political
pretender and aspirant to an earthly throne. The Jews who rejected the true
Messiah looked all the more eagerly for an imaginary Messiah that would break
the yoke of Rome and restore the theocracy of David in Jerusalem. Their carnal
millennarianism affected even some Christians, and Paul found it necessary to
warn them against rebellion and revolution. Among those expelled by the edict
of Claudius were Aquila and Priscilla, the hospitable friends of Paul, who were
probably converted before they met him in Corinth.497

The Jews, however, soon
returned, and the Jewish Christians also, but both under a cloud of suspicion.
To this fact Tacitus may refer when he says that the Christian superstition
which had been suppressed for a time (by the edict of Claudius) broke out again
(under Nero, who ascended the throne in 54).

Paul’s
Epistle.

In the early part of Nero’s
reign (54–68) the Roman congregation was already well known throughout
Christendom, had several meeting places and a considerable number of teachers.498 It was in view of this fact, and in prophetic anticipation of its
future importance, that Paul addressed to it from Corinth his most important
doctrinal Epistle (a.d. 58),
which was to prepare the way for his long desired personal visit. On his
journey to Rome three years later he found Christians at Puteoli (the modern
Puzzuolo at the bay of Naples), who desired him to tarry with them seven days.499 Some thirty or forty miles from the city, at Appii Forum and Tres
Tabernae (The Three Taverns), he was met by Roman brethren anxious to see the
writer of that marvellous letter, and derived much comfort from this token of
affectionate regard.500

Paul in
Rome.

His arrival in Rome, early in
the year 61, which two years later was probably followed by that of Peter,
naturally gave a great impulse to the growth of the congregation. He brought
with him, as he had promised, "the fulness of the blessing of Christ."
His very bonds were overruled for the progress of the gospel, which he was left
free to preach under military guard in his own dwelling.501 He had with him during the whole or a part of the first Roman
captivity his faithful pupils and companions: Luke, "the beloved
physician" and historian; Timothy, the dearest of his spiritual sons; John
Mark, who had deserted him on his first missionary tour, but joined him at Rome
and mediated between him and Peter; one Jesus, who is called Justus, a Jewish
Christian, who remained faithful to him; Aristarchus, his fellow-prisoner from
Thessalonica; Tychicus from Ephesus; Epaphras and Onesimus from Colossae;
Epaphroditus from Philippi; Demas, Pudens, Linus, Eubulus, and others who are
honorably mentioned in the Epistles of the captivity.502 They formed a noble band of evangelists and aided the aged
apostle in his labors at Rome and abroad. On the other hand his enemies of the
Judaizing party were stimulated to counter-activity, and preached Christ from
envy and jealousy; but in noble self-denial Paul rose above petty sectarianism,
and sincerely rejoiced from his lofty standpoint if only Christ was proclaimed
and his kingdom promoted. While he fearlessly vindicated Christian freedom
against Christian legalism in the Epistle to the Galatians, he preferred even a
poor contracted Christianity to the heathenism which abounded in Rome.503

The number which were converted
through these various agencies, though disappearing in the heathen masses of
the metropolis, and no doubt much smaller than the twenty thousand Jews, must
have been considerable, for Tacitus speaks of a "vast multitude" of
Christians that perished in the Neronian persecution in 64; and Clement,
referring to the same persecution, likewise mentions a "vast multitude of
the elect," who were contemporary with Paul and Peter, and who, "through
many indignities and tortures, became a most noble example among
ourselves" (that is, the Roman Christians).504

Composition
and Consolidation of the Roman Church.

The composition of the church of
Rome has been a matter of much learned controversy and speculation. It no doubt
was, like most congregations outside of Palestine, of a mixed character, with a
preponderance of the Gentile over the Jewish element, but it is impossible to
estimate the numerical strength and the precise relation which the two elements
sustained to each other.505

We have no reason to suppose
that it was at once fully organized and consolidated into one community. The
Christians were scattered all over the immense city, and held their devotional
meetings in different localities. The Jewish and the Gentile converts may have
formed distinct communities, or rather two sections of one Christian community.

Paul and Peter, if they met
together in Rome (after 63), would naturally, in accordance with the Jerusalem
compact, divide the field of supervision between them as far as practicable,
and at the same time promote union and harmony. This may be the truth which
underlies the early and general tradition that they were the joint founders of
the Roman church. No doubt their presence and martyrdom cemented the Jewish and
Gentile sections. But the final consolidation into one organic corporation was
probably not effected till after the destruction of Jerusalem.

This consolidation was chiefly
the work of Clement, who appears as the first presiding presbyter of the one
Roman church. He was admirably qualified to act as mediator between the disciples
of Peter and Paul, being himself influenced by both, though more by Paul. His
Epistle to the Corinthians combines the distinctive features of the Epistles of
Paul, Peter, and James, and has been called "a typical document,
reflecting the comprehensive principles and large sympathies which had been
impressed upon the united church of Rome."506

In the second century we see no
more traces of a twofold community. But outside of the orthodox church, the
heretical schools, both Jewish and Gentile, found likewise au early home in
this rendezvous of the world. The fable of Simon Magus in Rome reflects this
fact. Valentinus, Marcion, Praxeas, Theodotus, Sabellius, and other
arch-heretics taught there. In heathen Rome, Christian heresies and sects
enjoyed a toleration which was afterwards denied them by Christian Rome, until,
in 1870, it became the capital of united Italy, against the protest of the
pope.

Language.

The language of the Roman church
at that time was the Greek, and continued to be down to the third century. In
that language Paul wrote to Rome and from Rome; the names of the converts
mentioned in the sixteenth chapter of the Romans, and of the early bishops, are
mostly Greek; all the early literature of the Roman church was Greek; even the
so-called Apostles’ Creed, in the form held by the church of Rome, was
originally Greek. The first Latin version of the Bible was not made for Rome,
but for the provinces, especially for North Africa. The Greeks and Greek speaking
Orientals were at that time the most intelligent, enterprising, and energetic
people among the middle classes in Rome. "The successful tradesmen, the
skilled artisans, the confidential servants and retainers of noble
houses—almost all the activity and enterprise of the common people, whether for
good or for evil, were Greek."507

Social
Condition.

The great majority of the
Christians in Rome, even down to the close of the second century, belonged to
the lower ranks of society. They were artisans, freedmen, slaves. The proud
Roman aristocracy of wealth, power, and knowledge despised the gospel as a
vulgar superstition. The contemporary writers ignored it, or mentioned it only
incidentally and with evident contempt. The Christian spirit and the old Roman
spirit were sharply and irreconcilably antagonistic, and sooner or later had to
meet in deadly conflict.

But, as in Athens and Corinth,
so there were in Rome also a few honorable exceptions.

Paul mentions his success in the
praetorian guard and in the imperial household.508

It is possible, though not
probable, that Paul became passingly acquainted with the Stoic philosopher,
Annaeus Seneca, the teacher of Nero and friend of Burrus; for he certainly knew
his brother, Annaeus Gallio, proconsul at Corinth, then at Rome, and had
probably official relations with Burrus, as prefect of the praetorian guard, to
which he was committed as prisoner; but the story of the conversion of Seneca,
as well as his correspondence with Paul, are no doubt pious fictions, and, if
true, would be no credit to Christianity, since Seneca, like Lord Bacon, denied
his high moral principles by his avarice and meanness.509

Pomponia Graecina, the wife of
Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, who was arraigned for "foreign
superstition" about the year 57 or 58 (though pronounced innocent by her
husband), and led a life of continual sorrow till her death in 83, was probably
the first Christian lady of the Roman nobility, the predecessor of the ascetic
Paula and Eustochium, the companions of Jerome.510 Claudia and Pudens, from whom Paul sends greetings (2 Tim. 4:21),
have, by an ingenious conjecture, been identified with the couple of that name,
who are respectfully mentioned by Martial in his epigrams; but this is doubtful.511 A generation later two cousins of the Emperor Domitian (81–96),
T. Flavius Clemens, consul (in 95), and his wife, Flavia Domitilla, were
accused of "atheism, " that is, of Christianity, and condemned, the
husband to death, the wife to exile (a.d.
96).512 Recent
excavations in the catacomb of Domitilla, near that of Callistus, establish the
fact that an entire branch of the Flavian family had embraced the Christian
faith. Such a change was wrought within fifty or sixty years after Christianity
had entered Rome.513

*Schaff, Philip, History of
the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997.
This material has been carefully compared, corrected¸ and emended (according to
the 1910 edition of Charles Scribner's Sons) by The Electronic Bible Society,
Dallas, TX, 1998.

341 "Paul" (Little) is merely the Hellenized or Latinized
form for his Hebrew name "Saul" (Desired), and has nothing whatever
to do either with his own conversion, or with the conversion of Sergius Paulus
of Cyprus. There are many similar instances of double names among the Jews of
that time, as Hillel and Pollio, Cephas and Peter, John and Mark, Barsabbas and
Justus, Simeon and Niger, Silas and Silvanus. Paul may have received his Latin
name in early youth in Tarsus, as a Roman citizen; Paulus being the cognomen of
several distinguished Roman families, as the gens AEmilia, Fabia, Julia,
Sergia. He used it in his intercourse with the Gentiles and in all his
Epistles. See Hist. Apost. Ch., p. 226, and my annotations to Lange on Romans
1:1, pp. 57 and 58.

342 When Paul wrote to Philemon, a.d.
63, he was an aged man (presbuvth", Phil. 9), that is, about or
above sixty. According to Hippocrates a man was called presbuvth" from forty-nine to fifty-six, and after thatgevrwn,
senes. In a
friendly letter to a younger friend and pupil the expression must not be
pressed. Walter Scott speaks of himself as "an old grey man" at
fifty-five. Paul was still a "youth" (neaniva",
Acts 7:58) at the stoning of Stephen, which probably took place in 37; and
although this term is likewise vaguely used, yet as he was then already clothed
with a most important mission by the Sanhedrin, he must have been about or over
thirty years of age. Philo extends the limits of neaniva" from
twenty-one to twenty-eight, Xenophon to forty. Comp. Lightfoot on Philemon, v.
9 (p. 405), and Farrar, I., 13, 14.

343 Phil. 3:5. A Hebrew by descent and education, though a Hellenist
or Jew of the dispersion by birth, Acts 22:3. Probably his parents were
Palestinians. This would explain the erroneous tradition preserved by Jerome (De
vir. ill. c. 5), that Paul was born at Giscala in Galilee (now
El-Jish), and after the capture of the place by the Romans emigrated with his
parents to Tarsus. But the capture did not take place till a.d. 67

345 Gal. 4:14: "I made progress in Judaism beyond many of mine
own age in my nation, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my
fathers."

346 Scripture references and allusions abound in the Galatians,
Romans, and Corinthians, but are wanting in the Thessalonians, Colossians, and
Philemon, and in his address to the heathen hearers at Athens, whom he referred
to their own poets rather than to Moses and the prophets.

347 As the reasoning from the singular or rather collective spevrma(zera)in Gal. 3:16, the allegorical interpretation of Hagar and
Sarah, 4:22 sqq., and the rock in the wilderness, 1 Cor. 10:1-4. See the
commentaries.

As Epimenides was himself a
Cretan, this contemptuous depreciation of his countrymen gave rise to the
syllogistic puzzle: "Epimenides calls the Cretans liars; Epimenides was a
Cretan: therefore Epimenides was a liar: therefore the Cretans were not liars:
therefore Epimenides was not a liar," etc.

The passage occurs literally in
the Phoenomena of Aratus, v. 5, in the following connection:

...." We all greatly need
Zeus,

For we are his offspring; full of grace, he grants men

Tokens of favor ....

The Stoic poet, Cleanthes (Hymn. in Jovem, 5) uses the same expression in
an address to Jupiter: jEk souÀ ga;r gevno" ejsmevn, and in the Golden Poem, qeiÀon ga;r gevno" ejsti; brotoiÀsin. We may also quote a parallel
passage of Pindar, Nem. VI., which has been overlooked by commentators:

It is evident, however, that all
these passages were understood by their heathen authors in a materialistic and
pantheistic sense, which would make nature or the earth the mother of gods and
men. Paul in his masterly address to the Athenians, without endorsing the
error, recognizes the element of truth in pantheism, viz., the divine origin of
man and the immanence of God in the world and in humanity.

352 ta; stoiceiÀa touÀ kovsmou, Gal. 4:3, 9. So Hilgenfeld, Einleitung,
p. 223. Thiersch assumes (p. 112) that Paul was familiar with the
Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, and that his dialectics is classical rather
than rabbinical; but this is scarcely correct. In Romans 5:16, 18, he uses the
word dikaivwma in the Aristotelian sense of
legal adjustment (Rechtsausgleichung). See Eth. Nicom. v. 10,
and Rothe’s monograph on Rom. 5:12-21. Baur compares Paul’s style with that of
Thucydides.

353 Farrar, I. 629 sq., counts "upwards of fifty specimens of
thirty Greek rhetorical figures in St. Paul," which certainly disprove the
assertion of Renan that Paul could never have received even elementary lessons
in grammar and rhetoric at Tarsus.

354 Cor. 9:1 refers to the vision of Christ at Damascus. In 2 Cor.
5:16: though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we
him no more,"the particles eij kaiv (quamquam, even though, wenn auch) seem to chronicle a fact, as
distinct from kai; eij (etiam si, even if, selbst wenn), which puts an
hypothesis; but the stress lies on the difference between an external, carnal
knowledge of Christ in his humility and earthly relations or a superficial
acquaintance from hearsay, and a spiritual, experimental knowledge of Christ in
his glory. Farrar (I. 73 sqq.), reasons that if Paul had really known and heard
Jesus, he would have been converted at once.

355 He is called a tent-maker, skhnopoiov", Acts 18:3. Tents were mostly
made of the coarse hair of the Cilician goat (Kilivkio" travgo", which also denotes a coarse man), and needed by
shepherds, travellers, sailors, and soldiers. The same material was also used
for mantelets, shoes, and beds. The Cilician origin of this article is
perpetuated in the Latin cilicium and
the French cilice, which means hair-cloth. Gamaliel is the author of the
maxim that " learning of any kind unaccompanied by a trade ends in nothing
and leads to sin."

357 In 1 Cor. 9:5 (written in 57) he claims the right to lead a
married life, like Peter and the other apostles, and the brethren of the Lord;
but in 1 Cor. 7:7, 8 he gives for himself in his peculiar position the
preference to single life. Clement of Alexandria, Erasmus, and others supposed
that he was married, and understood Syzyge, in Phil. 4:3, to be his wife. Ewald
regards him as a widower who lost his wife before his conversion (VI. 341). So
also Farrar (I. 80) who infers from 1 Cor. 7:8 that Paul classed himself with
widowers: "I say, therefore, to the unmarried [to widowers, for
whom there is no special Greek word] and widows, it is good for them if they abide
even as I." He lays stress on the fact that the Jews in all ages
attached great importance to marriage as a moral duty (Gen. 1:28), and
preferred early marriage; he also maintains (I. 169) that Paul, being a
member of the Sanhedrin (as he gave his vote for the condemnation of the
Christiana, Acts26:10), must have had, according to the Gemara, a family of his
own. Renan fancies (ch. VI.) that Paul contracted a more than spiritual union
with sister Lydia at Philippi, and addressed her in Phil. 4:3 as
his suvzuge gnhvsie, that is, as his true co-worker or partner (conjux),
since it is not likely that he would have omitted her when he mentioned, in the
preceding verse, two deaconesses otherwise unknown, Euodia and Syntyche. The
word suvzugo",as a noun, may be either
masculine or feminine, and may either mean generally an associate, a co-worker
("yoke -fellow" in the E. V.), or be a proper name. Several persons
have been suggested, Epaphroditus, Timothy, Silas, Luke. But Paul probably
means a man, named Suvzugo"and plays upon the word:
"Yokefellow by name and yoke-fellow in deed." Comp. a similar
paronomasia in Philem. 10, 11jOnhvsimon, i.e., Helpful,-a[crhston, eu[crhston, unprofitable, profitable). See the notes of Meyer and Lange (Braune and
Hackett) on these passages.

358 This sublime loneliness of Paul is well expressed in a poem, Saint
Paul, by Frederic W. H. Myers (1868), from which we may be permitted to
quote a few lines:

"Christ! I am Christ’s! and
let the name suffice you;
Aye, for me, too, He greatly hath sufficed;

Lo, with no winning words I would entice you;
Paul has no honor and no friend but Christ.

" Yes, without cheer of
sister or of daughter—
Yes, w ithout stay of father or of son,

Lone on the land, and homeless on the water,
Pass I in patience till the work be done.

"Yet not in solitude, if
Christ anear me
Waketh Him workers for the great employ;

Oh, not in solitude, if souls that hear me
Catch from my joyance the surprise of joy.

Hearts I have won of sister or of brother,
Quick on the earth or hidden in the sod

Lo, every heart awaiteth me, another
Friend in the blameless family of God."

360 This is from the tradition preserved in the apocryphal Acts of
Thecla. See the description quoted above, p. 282. Other ancient
descriptions of Paul in the Philopatris of pseudo-Lucian (of the second,
but more probably of the fourth century), Malala of Antioch (sixth century),
and Nicephorus (fifteenth century), represent Paul as little in stature, bald,
with a prominent aquiline nose, gray hair and thick beard, bright grayish eyes,
somewhat bent and stooping, yet pleasant and graceful. See these descriptions
in Lewin’s St. Paul, II. 412. The oldest extant portraiture of
Paul, probably from the close of the first or beginning of the second century,
was found on a large bronze medallion in the cemetery of Domitilla (one of the
Flavian family), and is preserved in the Vatican library. It presents Paul on
the left and Peter on the right. Both are far from handsome, but full of
character; Paul is the homelier of the two, with apparently diseased eyes, open
mouth, bald head and short thick beard, but thoughtful, solemn, and dignified.
See a cut in Lewin, II. 211. Chrysostom calls Paul the three-cubit man (oJ trivphcu" a[nqrwpo", Serm. in Pet. et Paul.).
Luther imagined: "St. Paulus war ein armes, dürres
Männlein, wie Magister Philippus "(Melanchthon). A poetic description by J. H.
Newman see in Farrar I. 220, and in Plumptre on Acts, Appendix, with
another (of his own). Renan (Les Apôtres, pp. 169 sqq.) gives, partly from
Paul’s Epistles, partly from apocryphal sources, the following striking picture
of the apostle: His behavior was winning, his manners excellent, his letters
reveal a man of genius and lofty aspirations, though the style is incorrect.
Never did a correspondence display rarer courtesies, tenderer shades, more
amiable modesty and reserve. Once or twice we are wounded by his sarcasm (Gal.
5: 12; Phil. 3:2). But what rapture! What fulness of charming words! What
originality! His exterior did not correspond to the greatness of his soul. He
was ugly, short, stout, plump, of small head, bald, pale, his face covered with
a thick beard, an eagle nose, piercing eyes, dark eyebrows. His speech,
embarrassed, faulty, gave a poor idea of his eloquence. With rare tact he
turned his external defects to advantage. The Jewish race produces types of the
highest beauty and of the most complete homeliness (des types de la plus
grande beauté et de la plus complète laideur); but the Jewish
homeliness is quite unique. The strange faces which provoke laughter at first
sight, assume when intellectually enlivened, a peculiar expression of intense
brilliancy and majesty (une sorte d’éclat profond et de majesté).

361 2 Cor. 12:7-9; Gal. 4:13-15. Comp. also 1 Thess. 2:18; 1 Cor. 2:3;
2 Cor. 1:8, 9; 4:10. Of the many conjectures only three: sick headache, acute
ophthalmia, epilepsy, seem to answer the allusions of Paul which are dark to us
at such a distance of time, while they were clear to his personal friends.
Tertullian and Jerome, according to an ancient tradition, favor headache;
Lewin, Farrar, and many others, sore eyes, dating the inflammation from the
dazzling light which shone around him at Damascus (Acts 9:3, 17, 18; Comp.
22:13; 23:3, 5; Gal. 4:15); Ewald and Lightfoot, epilepsy, with illustration
from the life of King Alfred (Mohammed would be even more to the point). Other
conjectures of external, or spiritual trials (persecution, carnal temptations,
bad temper, doubt, despondency, blasphemous suggestions of the devil, etc.) are
ruled out by a strict exegesis of the two chief passages in 2 Cor. 12 and Gal.
4, which point to a physical malady. See an Excursus on Paul’s thorn in
the flesh in my Commentary on Gal. 4:13-15 (Pop. Com. vol.
III.).

365 Acts 9, 22, 26. These accounts are by no means mere repetitions,
but modifications and adaptations of the same story to the audience under
apologetic conditions, and bring out each some interesting feature called forth
by the occasion. This has been well shown by Dean Howson in Excursus C on Acts
26, in his and Canon Spence’s Commentary on Acts. The discrepancies of
the accounts are easily reconciled. They refer chiefly to the effect upon the
companions of Paul who saw the light, but not the person of Christ, and heard a
voice, but could not understand the words. The vision was not for them any more
than the appearance of the risen Lord was for the soldiers who watched the
grave. They were probably members of the Levitical temple guard, who were to
bind and drag the Christian prisoners to Jerusalem.

370 Acts 26:14. Christ said to him: sklhrovn soi pro;" kevntra laktivzein. This is a proverbial expression used by Greek
writers of refractory oxen in the plough when urged by a sharp-pointed
instrument of the driver. The ox may and often does resist, but by doing so he
only increases his pain. Resistance is possible, but worse than useless.

371 Rom. 7:7-25. This remarkable section describes the psychological
progress of the human heart to Christ from the heathen state of carnal
security, when sin is dead because unknown, through the Jewish state of legal
conflict, when sin, roused by the stimulus of the divine command, springs into
life, and the higher and nobler nature of man strives in vain to overcome this
fearful monster, until at last the free grace of God in Christ gains the
victory. Some of the profoundest divines-Augustin, Luther, Calvin-transfer this
conflict into the regenerate state; but this is described in the eighth chapter
which ends in an exulting song of triumph.

374 In his address to Peter at Antioch, Gal. 2:11-21, he gives an
account of his experience and his gospel, as contrasted with the gospel of the
Judaizers. Comp. Gal. 3:24; 5:24; 6:14; Rom. 7:6-13; Col. 2:20

378 Paul never numbers himself with the Twelve. He distinguishes
himself from the apostles of the circumcision, as the apostle of the
uncircumcision, but of equal authority with them. Gal. 2:7-9. We have no intimation
that the election of Matthias (Acts 1:26) was a mistake of the hasty Peter; it
was ratified by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit immediately following.

379 On the testimony of Paul to Christianity see above § 22.
I will add some good remarks of Farrar, I. 202: "It is impossible,"
he says, "to exaggerate the importance of St. Paul’s conversion as one of
the evidences of Christianity .... To what does he testify respecting Jesus? To
almost every single primary important fact respecting his incarnation, life,
sufferings, betrayal, last supper, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension,
and heavenly exaltation .... The events on which the apostle relied in proof of
Christ’s divinity, had taken place in the full blaze of contemporary knowledge.
He had not to deal with uncertainties of criticism or assaults on authenticity.
He could question, not ancient documents, but living men; he could analyze, not
fragmentary records, but existing evidence. He had thousands of means close at
hand whereby to test the reality or unreality of the Resurrection in which, up
to this time, he had so passionately and contemptuously disbelieved. In
accepting this half-crushed and wholly execrated faith he had everything in the
world to lose-he had nothing conceivable to gain; and yet, in spite of
all-overwhelmed by a conviction he felt to be irresistible—Saul, the Pharisee,
became a witness of the resurrection, a preacher of the cross."

381 This is fully recognized by Renan, who, however, has little
sympathy either with the apostle or the reformer, and fancies that the theology
of both is antiquated. "That historical character," he says,
"which upon the whole bears most analogy to St. Paul, is Luther. In both
there is the same violence in language, the same passion, the same energy, the
same noble independence, the same frantic attachment to a thesis embraced as the
absolute truth." St. Paul, ch. XXII. at the close. And his last
note in this book is this: "The work which resembles most in spirit the
Epistle to the Galatians is Luther’s De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae."

382 For particulars of his inner conflicts during his Erfurt period,
see Köstlin’s Martin Luther (1875), I. 40 sqq. and 61 sqq.

385 In the Clem.
Hom., XVII., ch. 19 (p. 351, ed. Dressel), Simon Peter says to Simon Magus:
"If, then, our Jesus appeared to you in a vision (di j oJravmato" oJfqeiv" made himself known to you, and conversed with you, it is as one who is enraged
with an adversary (wJ" ajntikeimevnw/
ojrgizovmeno").
And this is the reason why it was through visions and dreams (di j oJramavtwn kai; ejnupnivwn), or through revelations
that, were from without (h] kai; di j
ajpokaluvyewn e[zwqen oujsw'n) that He spoke to you. But can any one be rendered fit for instruction
through apparitions? (di j ojtasivan) .... And how are we to believe
your word, when you tell us that He appeared to you? And how did He appear to
you, when you entertain opinions contrary to His teaching? But if you have seen
and were taught by Him, and became His apostle for a single hour, proclaim His
utterances, interpret His sayings, love His apostles, contend not with me who
companied with Him. For you stand now in direct opposition to me, who am a firm
rock, the foundation of the church (sterea;n
pevtran, qemevlion ejkklhsiva", comp. Matt. 16:18). If you were not opposed to me, you
would not accuse me, and revile the truth proclaimed by me, in order that I may
not be believed when I state what I myself have heard with my own ears from the
Lord, as if I were evidently a person that was condemned and had not stood the
test [according to the true reading restored by Lagarde, ajdokivmou o[nto" instead of ejudokimou'nto",’in good repute’]. But if you
say that I am ’condemned’ (eij
kategnwsmevnon me levgei", comp. Gal. 2:11), you bring an accusation against God, who revealed the
Christ to me, and you inveigh against Him who pronounced me blessed on account
of the revelation (Matt. 16:17). But if you really wish to be a co-worker, in
the cause of truth, learn first of all from us what we have learned from Him,
and, becoming a disciple of the truth, become a fellow-worker with me."

The allusions to Paul’s
Christ-vision and his collision with Peter at Antioch are unmistakable, and
form the chief argument for Baur’s identification of Simon Magus with Paul. But
it is perhaps only an incidental sneer. Simon represents all anti-Jewish
heresies, as Peter represents all truths.

386 This theory was proposed by the so-called "vulgar" or
deistic rationalists (as distinct from the more recent speculative or
pantheistic rationalists), and has been revived and rhetorically embellished by
Renan in Les Apôtres (ch. X., pp. 175 sqq.). "Every step to
Damascus," says the distinguished French Academicien, "excited in
Paul bitter repentance; the shameful task of the hangman was intolerable to
him; he felt as if he was kicking against the goads; the fatigue of travel
added to his depression; a malignant fever suddenly seized him; the blood
rushed to the head; the mind was filled with a picture of midnight darkness
broken by lightning flashes; it is probable that one of those sudden storms of
Mount Hermon broke out which are unequalled for vehemence, and to the Jew the
thunder was the voice of God, the lightning the fire of God. Certain it is that
by a fearful stroke the persecutor was thrown on the ground and deprived of his
senses; in his feverish delirium he mistook the lightning for a heavenly
vision, the voice of thunder for a voice from heaven; inflamed eyes, the
beginning of ophthalmia, aided the delusion. Vehement natures suddenly pass
from one extreme to another; moments decide for the whole life; dogmatism is
the only thing which remains. So Paul changed the object of his fanaticism; by
his boldness, his energy, his determination he saved Christianity, which
otherwise would have died like Essenism, without leaving a trace of its memory.
He is the founder of independent Protestantism. He represents le
christianisme conquérant et voyageur. Jesus never dreamed of such
disciples; yet it is they who will keep his work alive and secure it
eternity." In this work, and more fully in his St. Paul, Renan
gives a picture of the great apostle which is as strange a mixture of truth and
error, and nearly as incoherent and fanciful, as his romance of Jesus in the Vie
de Jésus.

387 So Strauss (Leben Jesu, § 138, in connection with the
resurrection of Christ), Baur (with much more seriousness and force, in his Paul,
P. I., ch. 3) and the whole Tübingen School, Holsten, Hilgenfeld, Lipsius,
Pfleiderer, Hausrath, and the author of Supernatural Religion (III. 498
sqq.). Baur at last gave up the theory as a failure (1860, see below). But
Holsten revived and defended it very elaborately and ingeniously in his essay
on the Christusvision des Paulus, in Hilgenfeld’s
"Zeitschrift" for 1861. W. Beyschlag (of Halle) very ably refuted it
in an article: Die Bekehrung des Paulus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf
die Erklärungsversuche von Baur und Holsten, in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1864,
pp. 197-264. Then Holsten came out with an enlarged edition of his essay in
book form, Zum Evang. des Paulus und des Petrus, 1868, with a long reply
to Beyschlag. Pfleiderer repeated the vision-theory in his Hibbert Lectures (1885).

Some English writers have also
written on Paul’s conversion in opposition to this modern vision-theory,
namely, R. Macpherson: The
Ressurection of Jesus Christ (against Strauss), Edinb., 1867, Lect. XIII.,
pp. 316-360; Geo. P. Fisher: Supernatural Origin of
Christianity, N. York, new ed. 1877, pp. 459-470, comp. his essay on
"St. Paul" inDiscussions in History and Theology, N.Y. 1880,
pp. 487-511; A. B. Bruce (of
Glasgow): Paul’s Conversion and the Pauline Gospel, in the "Presbyt
Review" for Oct. 1880 (against Pfleiderer, whose work on Paulinism Bruce
calls "an exegetical justification and a philosophical dissipation of the
Reformed interpretation of the Pauline system of doctrine").

388 He describes it as an oujravnio"
ojptasiva Acts
26:19, and says that he saw Christ, that Christ was seen by him,
1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8. So the vision of the women at the tomb of the risen Lord is
called an ojptasiva tw'n ajggevlwn, Luke 24:23. But even Peter,
who was less critical than Paul, well knew how to distinguish between an actual
occurrence (an ajlhqw'" genovmenon) and a merely subjective vision
(a o{rama) Acts 12:9. Objective visions are divine revelations
through the senses; subjective visions are hallucinations and deceptions.

393 1 Cor 15:12 sqq. Dean Stanley compares this discussion to the
Phaedo of Plato and the Tusculan Disputations of Cicero, but it is far more
profound and assuring. Heathen philosophy can at best prove only the
possibility and probability, but not the certainty, of a future life. Moreover
the idea of immortality has no comfort, but terror rather, except for those who
believe in Christ, who is "the Resurrection and the Life."

400 The eujqew"of Acts 9:20 compels us to put
this short testimony during the few days (hJmejra" tinav") which he spent with the disciples at Damascus, before his departure to
Arabia. About three years afterwards (or after "many days,"hJmevrai iJkanaiv, were fulfilled, Acts 9:23), he returned to Damascus to
renew his testimony (Gal. 1:17).

401 Gal. 1:17, 18. In the Acts (9:23) this journey is ignored because
it belonged not to the public, but private and inner life of Paul.

404 Thus Godet sums up his life (Romans, Introd. I. 59). He
thinks that Paul was neither the substitute of Judas, nor of James the son of
Zebedee, but a substitute for a converted Israel, the man who had,
single-handed, to execute the task which properly fell to his whole nation; and
hence the hour of his call was precisely that when the blood of the two
martyrs, Stephen and James, sealed the hardening of Israel and decided its
rejection.

405 "Westward the course of empire takes its way." This
famous line of Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher, express a general law of
history both civil and religious. Clement of Rome says that Paul came on his
missionary tour "to the extreme west" (ejpi; to; tevrma th'" duvsew"), which means either Rome or Spain,
whither the apostle intended to go (Rom. 15:24, 28). Some English
historians (Ussher, Stillingfleet, etc.) would extend Paul’s travels to Gaul
and Britain, but of this there is no trace either in the New Test., or in the
early tradition. See below.

406 Rom. 1:16, "to the Jews first," not on the ground
of a superior merit (the Jews, as a people, were most unworthy and ungrateful),
but on the ground of God’s promise and the historical order (Rom. 15:8).

410 2 Tim. 4:6-8. We may add here the somewhat panegyric passage of
Clement of Rome, who apparently exalts Paul above Peter, Ep. ad Corinth. c.
5: "Let as set before our eyes the good Apostles. Peter, who on account of
unrighteous jealousy endured not one or two, but many toils, and thus having
borne his testimony (marturhvsa", or, suffered martyrdom), went
to his appointed place of glory. By reason of jealousy and strife Paul by his
example pointed out the price of patient endurance. After having been seven
times in bonds, driven into exile, stoned, and after having preached in the
East and in the West, he won the noble reward of his faith, having taught
righteousness unto the whole world and having reached the boundary of the West;
and when he had borne his testimony before the magistrates, he departed from
the world and went unto the holy place, having become the greatest example of
patient endurance."

411 Acts 9:23-25; comp. 2 Cor. 11:32, 33. The window of escape is
still shown in Damascus, as is also the street called Straight, the house of
Judas, and the house of Ananias. But these local traditions are uncertain.

415 "Paul left Athens," says Farrar (I. 550 sq.), "a
despised and lonely man. And yet his visit was not in vain .... He founded no
church at Athens, but there-it may be under the fostering charge of the
converted Areopagite-a church grew up. In the next century it furnished to the
cause of Christianity its martyr bishops and its eloquent apologists (Publius,
Quadratus, Aristides, Athenagoras). In the third century it flourished in peace
and purity. In the fourth century it was represented at Nicaea, and the noble
rhetoric of the two great Christian friends, St. Basil and St. Gregory of
Nazianzus, was trained in its Christian schools. Nor were many centuries to
elapse ere, unable to confront the pierced hands which held a wooden cross, its
myriads of deities had fled into the dimness of outworn creeds, and its
tutelary goddess, in spite of the flashing eyes which Homer had commemorated,
and the mighty spear which had been moulded out of the trophies of Marathon,
resigned her maiden chamber to the honour of that meek Galilaean maiden who had
lived under the roof of the carpenter at Nazareth-the virgin mother of the
Lord." Yet Athens was one of the last cities in the Roman empire which
abandoned idolatry, and it never took a prominent position in church history.
Its religion was the worship of ancient Greek genius rather than that of
Christ. "Il est been moins disciple de Jésus et de saint Paul
que de Plutarque et de Julien," says Renan, St. Paul, p. 208. His
chapter on Paul in Athens is very interesting.

416 In Corinth Paul wrote that fearful, yet truthful description of
pagan depravity in Rom. 1:18 sqq. The city was proverbially corrupt, so that korinqiavzomai means to practise whoredom, and korinqiasthv", a whoremonger. The great temple of Venus on the
acropolis had more than a thousand courtezans devoted to the service of lust.
With good reason Bengel calls a church of God in Corinth a "laetum et ingens paradoxon (in 1 Cor. 1:2). See the lively
description of Renan, St. Paul, ch. VIII. pp. 211 sqq

417 Weiss (Bibl. Theol. des N. T., 3d ed. p. 202) is inclined
to assign the composition of the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians to
the period of the imprisonment at Caesarea. So also Thiersch, Reuss, Schenkel,
Meyer, Zöckler, Hausrath. See Meyer Com. on Eph. (5th ed. by Woldemar
Schmidt, 1878, p. 18), and on the other side, Neander, Wieseler, and Lightfoot
(Philippians, 3d ed. 1873, p. 29), who date all the Epistles of the
captivity from Rome.

419 Bengel remarks on Acts 28:31 "Paulus Romae, apex evangelii, Actorum finis:
quae Lucas alioqui (2 Tim. 4:11)facile potuisset ad exitum Pauli perducere. Hierosolymis cœpit: Romae
desinit."
The abruptness of the close seems not to be accidental, for, as Lightfoot
remarks (Com. on Philippians, p. 3, note), there is a striking
parallelism between the Acts and the Gospel of Luke in their beginning and
ending, and there could be no fitter termination of the narrative, since it is
the realization of that promise of the universal spread of the gospel which is
the starting-point of the Acts.

421 Phil. 1:25; 2:24; Philem. 22. These passages, however, are not
conclusive, for the Apostle claims no infallibility in personal matters and
plans; he was wavering between the expectation and desire of speedy martyrdom
and further labors for the brethren, Phil. 1:20-23; 2:17. He may have been
foiled in his contemplated visit to Philippi and Colosse.

422 Rom. 15:24, 28. Renan denies a visit to the Orient, but thinks
that the last labors of Paul were spent in Spain or Gaul, and that he died in
Rome by the sword, a.d. 64 or later
(L’Antechrist, 106, 190). Dr. Plumptre (in the Introduction to his Com.
on Luke, and in an Appendix to his Com. on Acts) ingeniously
conjectures some connection between Luke, Paul’s companion, and the famous
poet, M. Annaeus Lucanus (the author of the Pharsalia, and a nephew of
Seneca), who was a native of Corduba (Cordova) in Spain, and on this basis he
accounts for the favorable conduct of J. Annaeus Gallic (Seneca’s brother)
toward Paul at Corinth, the early tradition of a friendship between Paul and
Seneca, and Paul’s journey to Spain. Rather fanciful.

426 Ewald (VI. 631) conjectures that Paul, on hearing of the Neronian
persecution, hastened back to Rome of his own accord, to bear testimony to Christ,
and being seized there, was again brought to trial and condemned to death, a.d. 65. Ewald assumes an intervening
visit to Spain, but not to the East.

429 A Latin inscription in Spain, which records the success of Nero in
extirpating the new superstition, Gruter, Inscript., p. 238, is now
commonly abandoned as spurious.

430 I must here correct an error into which I have fallen with Dr.
Wieseler, in my Hist. of the Ap. Ch., p. 342, by reading uJpo; to; tevrma and interpreting it "before the highest tribunal of
the West."ejpiv is the reading of the Cod. Alex.
(though defectively written), as I have convinced myself by an inspection of
the Codex in the British Museum in 1869, in the presence of Mr. Holmes and the
late Dr. Tregelles. The preposition stands at the end of line 17, fol. 159b, second col., in the IVth vol.
of the Codex, and is written in smaller letters from want of space, but by the
original hand. The same reading is confirmed by the newly discovered MS. of
Bryennios.

431 "Circumcision," says Renan (St. Paul, ch. III. p.
67)."was, for adults, a painful ceremony, one not without danger, and
disagreeable to the last degree. It was one of the reasons which prevented the
Jews from moving freely about among other people, and set them apart as a caste
by themselves. At the baths and gymnasiums, those important parts of the
ancient cities, circumcision exposed the Jew to all sorts of affronts. Every
time that the attention of the Greeks and Romans was directed to this subject,
outbursts of jestings followed. The Jews were very sensitive in this regard,
and avenged themselves by cruel reprisals. Several of them, in order to escape
the ridicule, and washing to pass themselves off for Greeks, strove to efface
the original mark by a surgical operation of which Celsus has preserved us the
details. As to the converts who accepted this initiation ceremony, they had
only one course to pursue, and that was to hide themselves in order to escape
sarcastic taunts. Never did a man of the world place himself in such a
position; and this is doubtless the reason why conversions to Judaism were much
more numerous among women than among men, the former not being put, at the very
outset, to a test, in every respect repulsive and shocking. We have many
examples of Jewesses married to heathens, but not a single one of a Jew married
to a heathen woman."

436 To what ridiculous extent some Jewish rabbis of the rigid school
of Shammai carried the overestimate of circumcision, may be seen from the
following deliverances quoted by Farrar (I. 401): "So great is
circumcision that but for it the Holy One, blessed be He, would not have
created the world; for it is said (Jer. 33:25), ’But for my covenant
[circumcision] I would not have made day and night, and the ordinance of heaven
and earth.’" "Abraham was not called ’perfect’ till he was
circumcised."

437 Paul mentions the subjective motive, Luke the objective call. Both
usually unite in important trusts. But Baur and Lipsius make this one of the
irreconcilable contradictions!

438 Luke reports the former and hints at the latter (comp. Acts 5 and
6) Paul reports the private understanding and hints at the public conference,
saying (Gal. 2:2): "I laid (ajneqevmhn) before them [the
brethren of Jerusalem] the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but
privately before them who were of repute (or, before those in
authority),"i.e., the pillar-apostles of the circumcision, James, Cephas,
and John, comp. Acts 2:9. Dr. Baur who denies the public conference,
mistranslates kat j ijdivan de; toiÀ'"
dokouÀsin und zwar
wandte ich mich speciell (specially) an die vorzugsweise Geltenden,"so that toi'" dokou'sin would be the same as the preceding aujtoi'" (Paul, ch. V. p. 117, in the
English translation, I. 122). But this would have been more naturally expressed
by toi'" dokouÀsin ejn aujtoi''" and kat j ijdivan,
as Grimm, the lexicographer of the N. T., remarks against Baur (l.c., p. 412),
does not mean "specially" at all, but privatim, seorsum, "apart,"
"in private," as in Mark 4:34, and kat j ijdivan eijpei'n, Diod. I. 21.

439 1.
The order
in which they are named by Paul is significant: James first, as the bishop of
Jerusalem and the most conservative, John last, as the most liberal of the
Jewish apostles. There is no irony in the term oij doko'Ànte" and oij stuÀloi, certainly not at the expense
of the apostles who were pillars in fact as well as in name and repute. If
there is any irony in Gal 2:6, oJpoi'oiv pote h\san, oujdevn moi
diafevrei, it is
directed against the Judaizers who overestimated the Jewish apostles to the
disparagement of Paul. Even Keim (l.c., p. 74) takes this view: "Endlich
mag man aufhören, von ironischer Bitterkeit des Paulus gegenüber den Geltenden
zu reden: denn wer gleich nachher den Bundesschluss mit den ’Säulen’feierlich
und befriedigt registrirt, der hat seine Abweisung der menschlichen Autoritäten
in v. 6 nicht
dem Andenken der Apostel gewidmet, sondern dem notorischen Uebermuth der
judenchristlichen Parteigänger in Galatien."

441 Barnabas, as the older disciple, still retained precedence in the
Jewish church, and hence is named first. A later forger would have reversed the
order.

442 Dr. Plumptre remarks against the Tübingen critics (on Acts 15:7):
"Of all doctrines as to the development of the Christian church, that
which sees in Peter, James, and John the leaders of a Judaizing anti-Pauline
party is, perhaps, the most baseless and fantastic. The fact that their names
were unscrupulously used by that party, both in their lifetime and, as the
pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions show, after their
death, cannot outweigh their own deliberate words and acts."

443 This is very evident from the indignant tone of Paul against the
Judaizers, and from the remark in Acts 15:6: pollhÀ" suzhthvsew" genomevnh", comp. Acts 15:2: genomevnh" stavsew"(factious party spirit,
insurrection, Luke 23:19; Mark 15:7) kaiv
zhthvsew" oujk ojlivgh". Such strong terms show that Luke by no means casts the
veil of charity over the differences in the apostolic church.

445 Acts 16:3. The silence of Luke concerning the non-circumcision of
Titus has been distorted by the Tübingen critics into a wilful suppression of
fact, and the mention of the circumcision of Timothy into a fiction to subserve
the catholic unification of Petrinism and Paulinism. What a designing and
calculating man this anonymous author of the Acts must have been, and yet not
shrewd enough to conceal his literary fraud or to make it more plausible by
adapting it to the account in the Galatians, and by mentioning the full
understanding between the apostles themselves! The book of Acts is no more a
full history of the church or of the apostles than the Gospels are full
biographies of Christ.

447 Gal. 5:6; 6:15; 1 Cor. 7:19. Dr. Plumptre’s remarks on the last
passage are to the point: "Often those who regard some ceremony as
unimportant magnify the very disregard of it into a necessary virtue. The
apostle carefully guards against that by expressing the nothingness of both
circumcision and uncircumcision (Rom. 2:25; Gal. 5:6; 6:15). The circumicision
of Timothy, and the refusal to circumcise Titus by St. Paul himself, are
illustrations at once of the application of the truth here enforced, and of the
apostle’s scrupulous adherence to the principles of his own teaching. To have
refused to circumcise Timothy would have attached some value to
noncircumcision. To have circumcised Titus would have attached some value to
circumcision."

452 The Gentile form of greeting, caivrein,
Acts 15:23, occurs again in James 1:1, but nowhere else in the New Testament,
except in the letter of the heathen, Claudius Lysias (Acts 23:26); the usual
form being cavri" kai; eijrhvnh. This is likewise one of those
incidental coincidences and verifications which are beyond the ken of a forger.

453 According to the oldest reading, oiJ ajpovstoloi kai; oiJ presbuvteroi ajdelfoiv, which may also be rendered:
"the apostles, and the presbyters, brethren;" comp. Acts 15:22. The
omission of ajdelfoiv in some MSS. may be due to the
later practice, which excluded the laity from synodical deliberations.

456 Acts 21:15. Comp. also Rev. 2:14, 20. But why does Paul never
refer to this synodical decree? Because he could take a knowledge of it for
granted, or more probably because he did not like altogether its restrictions,
which were used by the illiberal constructionists against him and against Peter
at Antioch (Gal. 2:12). Weizsäcker and Grimm (l.c., p. 423) admit the historic
character of some such compromise, but transfer it to a later period (Acts
21:25), as a proposition made by James of a modus vivendi with Gentile
converts, and arbitrarily charge the Acts with an anachronism. But the
consultation must have come to a result, the result embodied in a formal action,
and the action communicated to the disturbed churches.

457 Justin Martyr, about the middle of the second century, considered
the eating of eijdwlovquta as bad as idolatry. Dial. c.
Tryph. Jud. 35

458 Ex. 34:,15; Lev. 17:7 sqq.; Deut. 12:23 sqq. The reason assigned
for the prohibition of the taste of blood is that "the life of the
flesh is in the blood," and the pouring out of blood is the means of
"the atonement for the soul" (Lev. 17:11). The prohibition of
blood as food was traced back to the time of Noah, Gen. 9:4, and seems to have
been included in the seven "Noachian commandments" so-called, which
were imposed upon the proselytes of the gate, although the Talmud nowhere
specifies them very clearly. The Moslems likewise abhor the tasting of blood.
But the Greeks and Romans regarded it as a delicacy. It was a stretch of
liberality on the part of the Jews that pork was not included among the
forbidden articles of food. Bentley proposed to read in Acts 15:20 porkeiva (frompovrko", porcus) for porneiva, but without a shadow of evidence.

465 Without intending any censure, we may illustrate the position of
the strict constructionists of the school of St. James by similar examples of
conscientious and scrupulous exclusiveness. Roman Catholics know no church but
their own, and refuse all religious fellowship with non Catholics; yet many of
them will admit the action of divine grace and the possibility of salvation
outside of the limits of the papacy. Some Lutherans maintain the principle:
"Lutheran pulpits for Lutheran ministers only; Lutheran altars for
Lutheran communicants only." Luther himself refused at Marburg the hand of
fellowship to Zwingli, who was certainly a Christian, and agreed with him in
fourteen out of fifteen articles of doctrine. High church Anglicans recognize no
valid ministry without episcopal ordination; close communion Baptists admit no
valid baptism but by immersion; and yet the Episcopalians do not deny the
Christian character of non-Episcopalians, nor the Baptists the Christian
character of Pedo-Baptists, while they would refuse to sit with them at the
Lord’s table. There are psalm-singing Presbyterians who would not even worship,
and much less commune, with other Presbyterians who sing what they call
"uninspired" hymns. In all these cases, whether consistently or not,
a distinction is made between Christian fellowship and church fellowship. With
reference to all these and other forms of exclusiveness we would say in the
spirit of Paul: "In Christ Jesus neither circumcision" (viewed as a
mere sign) "availeth anything, nor uncircumcision," neither
Catholicism nor Protestantism, neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism, neither
Calvinism nor Arminianism, neither episcopacy nor presbytery, neither immersion
nor pouring nor sprinkling, nor any other accidental distinction of birth and
outward condition, but "a new creature, faith working through love, and
the keeping of the commandments of God."Gal. 5:6; 6:15; 1 Cor. 7:19.

466 The imperfect sunhvsqien meta;
tw'n ejqnw'n, Gal.
2:12, indicates habit he used to eat with the uncircumcised Christians.
This is the best proof from the pen of Paul himself that Peter agreed with him
in principle and even in his usual practice. The eating refers, in all
probability, not only to common meals, but also to the primitive love-feasts
(agapae) and the holy communion, where brotherly recognition and fellowship is
consummated and scaled.

468 tine;" ajpo; jIakwvbou, Gal, 2:12, seems to imply that
they were sent by James (comp. Matt. 26:47; Mark 5:25; John 3:2), and not
simply disciples of James or members of his congregation, which would be
expressed by tine;" tw'n ajpo; jIakwvbou. See Grimm, l.c., p. 427.

469 There are not a few examples of successful intimidations of strong
and bold men. Luther was so frightened at the prospect of a split of the holy Catholic
church, in an interview with the papal legate, Carl von Miltitz, at Altenburg
in January, 1519, that he promised to write and did write a most humiliating
letter of submission to the Pope, and a warning to the German people against
secession. But the irrepressible conflict soon broke out again at the Leipzig
disputation in June, 1519.

470 Gal 2:14-21. We take this section to be a brief outline of Paul’s
address to Peter; but the historical narrative imperceptibly passes into
doctrinal reflections suggested by the occasion and adapted to the case of the
Galatians. In the third chapter it naturally expands into a direct attack on
the Galatians.

471 Paul draws, in the form of a question, a false conclusion
of the Judaizing opponents from correct premises of his own, and rejects
the conclusion with his usual formula of abhorrence, mh; gevnoito,
as in Rom. 6:2.

472 Gal. 2:11, Peter stood self-condemned and condemned by the Gentiles,
kategnwsmevno" h\n, not " blameworthy," or
" was to be blamed"(E. V.).

475 So Clement of Alexandria, and other fathers, also the Jesuit
Harduin.

476 This monstrous perversion of Scripture was advocated even by such
fathers as Origen, Jerome, and Chrysostom. It gave rise to a controversy
between Jerome and Augustin, who from a superior moral sense protested against
it, and prevailed.

479 The E. V. translates uJperlivan
ajpovstoloi, 2 Cor.
11:5, "the very chiefest apostles," Plumptre better, "those
apostles-extraordinary." They are identical with the yeudapovstoloi, 11:13, and not with the pillar-apostles of the circumcision, Gal. 2:9;
see above, p. 334, note 1.

482 See some of these eulogistic descriptions in Friedländer, I. 9,
who says that the elements which produced this overwhelming impression were
"the enormous, ever changing turmoil of a population from all lands, the
confusing and intoxicating commotion of a truly cosmopolitan intercourse, the
number and magnificence of public parks and buildings, and the immeasurable
extent of the city." Of the Campagna he says, p. 10: "Wo
sich jetzt eine ruinenerfüllte Einöde gegen das Albanesergebirge hinerstreckt, über der
Fieberluft brütet, war damals eine durchaus gesunde, überall angebaute, von
Leben wimmelden Strassen durchschnittene Ebene."See Strabo, v. 3, 12

483 Friedländer, I. 54 sqq., by a combination of certain data, comes
to the conclusion that Rome numbered under Augustus (A. U. 749) 668,600 people,
exclusive of slaves, and 70 or 80 years later from one and a half to two
millions.

485 By Renan, L’Antechrist, p. 7; Friedländer, I. 310, 372; and
Harnack, l.c., p. 253. But Hausrath, l.c., III. 384,
assumes 40,000 Jews in Rome under Augustus, 60,000 under Tiberius. We know from
Josephus that 8,000 Roman Jews accompanied a deputation of King Herod to
Augustus (Ant. XVII. 11, 1), and that 4,000 Jews were banished by
Tiberius to the mines of Sardinia (XVIII. 3, 5; comp. Tacitus, Ann. II.
85). But these data do not justify a very definite calculation.

489 "Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Otho, was the fairest woman of
her time, and with the charms of beauty she combined the address of an
accomplished intriguer. Among the dissolute women of imperial Rome she stands preëminent.
Originally united to Rufius Crispinus, she allowed herself to be seduced by
Otho, and obtained a divorce in order to marry him. Introduced by this new
connection to the intimacy of Nero, she soon aimed at a higher elevation. But
her husband was jealous and vigilant, and she herself knew how to allure the
young emperor by alternate advances and retreats, till, in the violence of his
passion, he put his friend out of the way by dismissing him to the government
of Lusitania. Poppaea suffered Otho to depart without a sigh. She profited by
his absence to make herself more than ever indispensable to her paramour, and
aimed, with little disguise, at releasing herself from her union and
supplanting Octavia, by divorce or even death." Merivale, Hist. of the
Romans, VI. 97. Nero accidentally kicked Poppaea to death when in a state
of pregnancy (65), and pronounced her eulogy from the rostrum. The senate
decreed divine honors to her. Comp. Tac. Ann. XIII. 45, 46; XVI. 6;
Suet., Nero, 35.

490 "Victi victoribus leges dederunt."Quoted by Augustin (De Civit. Dei, VI. 11)
from a lost work, De Superstitionibus. This word received a singular illustration a few years after Seneca’s
death, when Berenice, the daughter of King Agrippa, who had heard the story of
Paul’s conversion at Caesarea (Acts 25:13, 23), became the acknowledged
mistress first of Vespasianus and then of his son Titus, and presided in the
palace of the Caesars. Titus promised to marry her, but was obliged, by the
pressure of public opinion, to dismiss the incestuous adulteress. "Dimisit
invitus invitam." Sueton. Tit., c. 7; Tacit. Hist., II.
81.

491 The history of the Roman Ghetto (the word is derived from [Dg:, caedo, to cut down, comp. Isa. 10:33; 14:12; 15:2; Jer. 48:25,
27, etc., presents a curious and sad chapter in the annals of the papacy. The
fanatical Pope Paul IV. (1555-’59) caused it to be walled in and shut out from
all intercourse with the Christian world, declaring in the bull Cum nimis:
"It is most absurd and unsuitable that the Jews, whose own crime has
plunged them into everlasting slavery, under the plea that Christian
magnanimity allows them, should presume to dwell and mix with Christians, not
bearing any mark of distinction, and should have Christian servants, yea even
buy houses." Sixtus V. treated the Jews kindly on the plea that they were
"the family from which Christ came;" but his successors, Clement VIII.,
Clement XI., and Innocent XIII., forbade them all trade except that in old
clothes, rags, and iron. Gregory XIII. (1572-’85), who rejoiced over the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, forced the Jews to hear a sermon every week, and
on every Sabbath police agents were sent to the Ghetto to drive men, women, and
children into the church with scourges, and to lash them if they paid no
attention! This custom was only abolished by Pius IX., who revoked all the
oppressive laws against the Jews. For this and other interesting information
about the Ghetto see Augustus J. C. Hare, Walks in Rome, 1873, 165 sqq.,
and a pamphlet of Dr. Philip, a Protestant missionary among the Jews in Rome, On
the Ghetto, Rome, 1874.

494 Given up even by Roman Catholic historians in Germany, but still
confidently reasserted by Drs. Northcote and Brownlow, l.c. I.,p. 79,
who naively state that Peter went to Rome with Cornelius and the Italian band
in 42. Comp. on this subject §26, pp. 254 sqq.

495 Rom. 16:7, "Salute Andronicus and Junias (or Junia), my
kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners who ... have been in Christ before me."
If Junias is masculine, it must be a contraction from Junianus, as Lucas from
Lucanus. But Chrysostom, Grotius, Reiche, and others take it as a female,
either the wife or sister of Andronicus.

496 Sueton., Claud., c. 25: "Judaeos impulsore Chresto
assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit." The Romans often confounded Christus (the
Anointed) andChrestus (from crhstov",
useful, good), and called the Christians crhstianoiv, Chrestiani. Compare the French form chrétien.
Justin Martyr uses this etymological error as an argument against the
persecution of the Christians for the sake of their name. Apol. I.,c. 4
(I. p. 10, ed. Otto): Cristianoi; ei\nai
kathgorouvmeqa, to; de; crhsto;n miseiÀ'sqai ouj divkaion. He knew, however, the true
origin of the name of Christ, I.c. 12: jIhsou'" Cristov", ajf j ou\ kai;
to; Cristianoi; ejponomavzesqai ejschvkamen. Tertullian says that the name Christus was almost
invariably mispronounced Chrestus bythe heathen. Apol., c. 3; Ad
Nat., I.3. This mistake continued to be made down to the fourth century,
Lactantius, Instit. Div., IV. 7, and is found also in Latin inscriptions.
Renan derives the name Christianus from the Latin (like Herodian, Matt.
22:16, Pompejani, Caesareani), as the derivation from the Greek
would require Crivsteio" (Les âpotres, p. 234).
Lightfoot denies this, and refers to Sardiano;", Trallianov"(Philippians, p.16, note 1); but Renan would regard these nouns as
Latinisms like jAsianov" (Acts 20:4, Strabo, etc.).
Antioch, where the name originated (Acts 11:26), had long before been Romanized
and was famous for its love of nicknames. Renan thinks that the term originated
with the Roman authority as an appellation de police. The other two
passages of the N.T. in which it occurs, Acts 26:28; 1 Pet. 4:16, seem to imply
contempt and dislike, and so it is used by Tacitus and Suetonius. But what was
originally meant by the heathen to be a name of derision has become the name of
the highest honor. For what can be nobler and better than to be a true
Christian, that is, a follower of Christ. It is a remarkable fact that the name
" Jesuit,"which was not in use till the sixteenth century, has
become, by the misconduct of the order which claimed it, a term of reproach
even in Roman Catholic countries; while the term " Christian"embraces
proverbially all that is noble, and good, and Christ-like.

497 Acts 18:2; Rom. 16:3. An unconverted Jew would not have taken the
apostle under his roof and into partnership. The appellation .jIoudai'o" often signifies merely the nationality (comp. Gal.
2:13-15). The name Aquila, i.e., Eagle, Adler, is still common among Jews, like
other high sounding animal names (Leo, Leopardus, Löwe, Löwenherz, Löwenstein,
etc.). The Greek jAkuvla" was a transliteration of the
Latin, and is probably slightly altered in Onkelos, the traditional author of
one of the Targums, whom the learned Emmanuel Deutsch identifies with Aquila (jAkuvla", slyq[ in the Talmud), the Greek translator of the Old
Testament, a convert to Judaism in the reign of Hadrian, and supposed nephew of
the emperor. Liter. Remains (N. York, 1874), pp. 337-340. The
name of his wife, Priscilla (the diminutive form of Prisca), " probably
indicates a connection with the gens of the Prisci, who appear in
the earliest stages of Roman history, and supplied a long series of praetors
and consuls." Plumptre on Acts, 18:2.

499 Acts 28:13. Puteoli was, next after Ostia, the chief harbor of
Western Italy and the customary port for the Alexandrian grain ships; hence the
residence of a large number of Jewish and other Oriental merchants and sailors.
The whole population turned out when the grain fleet from Alexandria arrived.
Sixteen pillars still remain of the mole on which St. Paul landed. See
Friedländer, II. 129 sq.; III. 511, and Howson and Spence on Acts 28:13.

500 Acts 28:15. The Forum of Appius (the probable builder of the
famous road called after him) is denounced by Horace as a wretched town
"filled with sailors and scoundrel tavern-keepers." Tres Tabernae was
a town of more importance, mentioned in Cicero’s letters, and probably located
on the junction of the road from Antium with the Via Appia, near the modern
Cisterna. The distances from Rome southward are given in the Antonine Itinerary
as follows: "to Aricia, 16 miles; to Tres Tabernae, 17 miles; to Appii
Forum, 10 miles."

505 Comp. my Hist. Ap. Ch., p. 296 sqq. Dr. Baur
attempted to revolutionize the traditional opinion of the preponderance of the
Gentile element, and to prove that the Roman church consisted almost
exclusively of Jewish converts, and that the Epistle to the Romans is a defense
of Pauline universalism against Petrine particularism. He was followed by
Schwegler, Reuss, Mangold, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, Holsten, Holtzmann., and also
to some extent by Thiersch and Sabatier. But he was opposed by Olshausen,
Tholuck, Philippi, De Wette, Meyer, Schott, Hofmann, in favor of the other
view. Beyschlag proposed a compromise to the effect that the majority, in
conformity with Paul’s express statements, were Gentile Christians, but mostly
ex-proselytes, and hence shared Judaizing convictions. This view has been
approved by Schürer and Schultz. Among the latest and ablest discussions are
those of Weizsäcker and Godet, who oppose the views both of Baur and Beyschlag.
The original nucleus was no doubt Jewish, but the Gentile element soon outgrew
it, as is evident from the Epistle itself, from the last chapter of Acts, from
the Neronian persecution, and other facts. Paul had a right to regard the Roman
congregation as belonging to his own field of labor. The Judaizing tendency was
not wanting, as we see from the 14th and 15th chapters, and from allusions in
the Philippians and Second Timothy, but it had not the character of a bitter
personal antagonism to Paul, as in Galatia, although in the second century we
find also a malignant type of Ebionism in Rome, where all heretics congregated.

507 Lightfoot, l.c., p. 20. See especially the investigations
of Caspari, in his Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols, vol. III. (1875), 267-466.
According to Friedländer, I. 142, 481, Greek was the favorite language at the
imperial court, and among lovers.

508 Phil. 1:13; 4: 22. The praitwvrion embraces the officers as well as
the soldiers of the imperial regiments; oiJ ek
th'" kaivsaro" oijkiva" may include high functionaries
and courtiers as well as slaves and freedmen, but the latter is more probable.
The twenty names of the earlier converts mentioned in Rom. 16 coincide largely
with those in the Columbaria of the imperial household on the Appian
way. Comp. Lightfoot, Philipp., p. 169 sqq., Plumptre, Excursus to his Com.
on Acts, and Harnack, l.c., pp. 258 sq. Harnack makes it appear
that the two trusty servants of the Roman church, Claudius Ephebus and Valerius
Bito, mentioned in the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, c. 63, belonged
to the household of the emperor Claudius.

509 See above, § 29, p. 279, especially the essay of Lightfoot quoted
there. Harnack (l.c., p. 260) and Friedländer regard the acquaintance of
Paul with Seneca as very improbable, Plumptre as probable. An epitaph from the
third century was found in Ostia which reads: D M. M. Anneo. Paulo. Petro. M. Anneus. Paulus.
Filio. Carissimo. See De Rossi in the Bullet. di archeol.
christ., 1867, pp. 6 sq., and Renan, L’Antechrist, p. 12. Seneca
belonged to the gens Annaea. But all that the inscription can be made to
prove is that a Christian member of the gens Annaea in the third century
bore the name of "Paul," and called his son "Paulus
Petrus," a combination familiar to Christiana, but unknown to the heathen.
Comp, Friedländer, III. 535.

510 Here Christianity has been inferred from the vague description of
Tacitus, Ann. XIII. 32. See Friedländer III. 534; Lightfoot, p. 21;
Northcote and Brownlow, I. 82 sq. Harnack, p. 263. The inference is confirmed
by the discovery of the gravestone of a Pomponius Graecinus and other
members of the same family, in the very ancient crypt of Lucina, near the
catacomb of St. Callistus. De Rossi conjectures that Lucina was the Christian
name of Pomponia Graecina. But Renan doubts this, L’Antech., p. 4, note
2.

511 Plumptre, l.c. Martial, a spaniard by birth, came to Rome a.d. 66.